Across the room the two sluts rose and departed, leaving their incapacitated Romeo amid the beer mugs. The moving gust of air from the opening door made the brownish shadows jump over Caris’ elegant cheekbones and nose as he glanced automatically up to make sure no one else entered. It was gray dawn outside, lightening toward day. Though reeking of garbage and horses, the air smelled fresher than the dark and beery frowst inside.
“Record...” He looked back at her dubiously. “So that it can be reproduced at any time, you mean?”
Joanna nodded. “But you have the same thing. The—Crier, did you call it?” She glanced across at Antryg in time to see him cache the squat black bottle of gin he’d ordered in one of his copious coat pockets.
“Not really,” the wizard said. “The Crier doesn’t record a sound, but an emotional reaction which you associate with sound, in much the same way the spell of tongues allows you to understand what I’m saying now. There are other spells that reproduce sound—Screamer and terror-spells—fairly simple, really. Have you a screw-cap jar with a wide mouth in that bag of yours, my dear?”
Joanna wordlessly produced one. Antryg cast a quick glance to make sure the proprietress wasn’t looking, then began spooning honey into it. He went on, “Caris heard his grandfather’s voice calling for help, didn’t you, Caris? Whereas you, Joanna, heard—your lover’s?”
The word took her by surprise; her reaction to it, even more so. She had always subconsciously thought of Gary as “boyfriend”—a somewhat childish word never adequately replaced in adult parlance. She wondered, a moment later, why her first impulse had been to shy away from the use of the word lover—in the physical sense, that was what he had been. But she understood for the first time that she did make the distinction, and the distinction was a critical one.
Gary, she thought, a little sadly, would never be anything but a “boyfriend.”
He probably wouldn’t even realize yet that she was gone, she reflected later, as they left the inn with the first brightness of the day dispersing the gloom in the lanes. Her car would still be at his place. Possibly he’d deduced—although privately she didn’t consider Gary capable of deductive reasoning—that she’d gone home with someone else.
As she remembered his words about his being the only man who’d want her, the thought pleased some small, vindictive corner of her heart. Thus he might not find it odd she didn’t answer her telephone all day yesterday, which was Sunday. It was only when he went to work today, smugly counting on meeting her at the office and offering her a ride to his place to pick up her car—with the obligatory Let’s have dinner and Why don’t you spend the night thrown in—would he realize she was, in fact, missing. He might spend another day or two trying to reach Ruth before that jet-propelled, stainless steel butterfly remembered to listen to her answering machine, called him back, and they figured out that nobody had seen Joanna since Saturday night.
It was a slightly unnerving thought.
The air outside was fresher, reviving her and chasing the insistent cobwebs of sleepiness from her brain. The night had never really cooled off; the morning, already sticky-warm, though the sun was not yet in the sky, promised hot. It was in her mind that now would be the ideal time to make her escape from Antryg—except that, in this world, there was nowhere for her to go. It was rather like trying to escape from a rowboat in the middle of an ocean—her options were limited. The best she could do, she thought, was stay with the wizard and his captor and hope they could locate the Council—or, at worst, talk Antryg into sending her back himself.
Once outside the inn, Antryg turned, not toward the lane upon which it stood, but into the smelly little alleyway that ran between it and the bathhouse. Caris followed, clearly uneasy, because, in his peasant clothes, he couldn’t openly have a weapon in hand. The pistol was concealed under his smock, available, but awkward to get at. Joanna, holding up her skirts from the mud, brought up the rear, reflecting that all the swashbuckler films she’d seen had apparently forgotten to mention certain facts of life, like pig dung in the lanes and the general awkwardness of petticoats.
In the alley, Antryg unscrewed the cap from his jar of pilfered honey, tore pellets from the bread he’d pocketed, and, with the assistance of a little of the mud and offal liberally available underfoot, created half a dozen disgustingly convincing pustules to cover the bruise on Caris’ face. “I don’t suppose you could manage to drool and stagger a bit?” he asked judiciously, producing the gin bottle from another pocket. Its reeking contents, dumped over the sasennan’s clothes, totally drowned the smell of the honey. Caris only looked indignant. “I didn’t think so. Pity the rag shop didn’t have sasennan’s gear to fit Joanna—then she could have carried your sword openly instead of bundling it up as it is.”
Joanna glanced at the big, sloppy bundle which contained her own clothes, sneakers, and bulging purse, Caris’ torn and shabby black uniform and boots, and a couple of hooded cloaks which could double as light blankets, should the weather turn cool. It was tied loosely onto a pole, which concealed the long, hard-edged shape of Caris’ sword, but it still didn’t look particularly convincing. “We could always say they belonged to my brother,” she pointed out. “The Witchfinders only think they’re looking for one person, or at most two, or... Could you pass yourself off as a free sasennan?”
“A free sasennan is a contradiction,” Caris said, turning away from trying to catch a glimpse of his reflection in a nearby rain barrel. “There are no free sasenna. The Way of the Sasenna is to serve. We are the weapons, no more, of those who hold our vows.”
Joanna shouldered the long bundle and followed the two of them from the alley and into the lane once more. Flies were already beginning to buzz around the greenish scum in the gutters; Caris waved furiously at them as they hummed around the fake sores on his face.
“But what about you?” she asked.
His back stiffened. Momentarily he forgot that he was supposed to be a pox-ridden drunk. “My masters are and always will be the Council of Wizards,” he said. Under the dirty slime, his face was cold and proud as Athenian marble. “My grandfather is not dead....”
“Isn’t he?” Antryg asked softly.
Caris halted and turned to face the wizard in the lead-colored shadows of the lane. “If he were,” he said with equal quiet, “there is only one way that you could know it, Antryg Windrose.”
“Is there?” The mage tipped his head on one side, his gray eyes suddenly very weary behind their heavy specs. “He was my master, Caris; we traveled together for many years. Don’t you think I would know?”
The sasennan’s voice had an edge to it like chipped flint. “He was not your master,” he said softly. “Suraklin was your master.”
“So he was.” Antryg sighed, turning back to the lane. “So he was.”
They moved out into the main street. Though it was fully light now, the sun had not yet risen above the roofs of the houses; the gold brilliance of it flashed from the slates of the roofs, but the lanes themselves were like canals of still, blue shade. Rather to Joanna’s surprise, since it couldn’t have been more than five in the morning, the lanes were crowded, men, women, and small children jostling along the herringbone brick cobbles between the wooden houses. Some, in the dark livery of servants, carried market-baskets; tiny children and old men in rags held out skinny hands to them and whined for alms. A few of the women were better dressed, strolling with their maids and looking about them, as Joanna was doing, savoring the glory of sun flashing from the wings of the pigeons that circled overhead and the sweet, wild scent of the hay marsh that blew in over the stinks of the waking town. But most of those abroad on the street, roughly dressed and still-faced, hurried drearily along with the stride of those whose sleep has been insufficient and who care nothing for the beauty of a day that will not be theirs.
They turned a corner into the main thoroughfare of Kymil. The clattering of wheels and hooves that Joanna had heard far-off grew louder, and the slanting
sunlight sparkled on the broad street before her, the tepid air redolent with the smell of horses. Carts in incredible numbers clattered by, laden with produce or rickety coops of chickens; butchers’ wagons darted between them, as if trying to outpace pursuing swarms of flies; drays of sand or beer barrels rumbled heavily on the cobbles. Just ahead of them, Joanna saw a little boy with a broom dart out into the street to sweep a path through the accumulated muck for a couple of well-dressed ladies. One of them flung the boy a coin, which he caught like a Cubs outfielder jumping for a pop fly.
Joanna stood still upon the flagway, the bundle forgotten on her shoulder, staring around her in a kind of amazement. Yesterday’s walk through the countryside and last night’s brush with Church authorities and magic had not prepared her for the thoroughly prosaic scene before her. Antryg paused beside her, causing Caris to turn back toward them suspiciously, but the wizard only asked, slightly amused, “What is it?”
She shook her head. The truth sounded silly, but she said, “I sort of expected it to be... more medieval.”
Antryg grinned, comprehending her surprise and appreciating her rueful self-amusement at her assumptions. “Not the sort of place you expected to find wizards in, is it?”
Joanna looked around her again. Down the lane to their left, massive, dreary brick factories crouched against the shining gold of the sun-shot river; a group of little girls in patched dresses moved past like a school of fish and, with unwilling haste, joined the throng of men and women milling toward the factory gates. Beside her, Caris said, “It is why wizards are forbidden to touch human affairs—so that we can have such a world.” He shrugged, clearly ill at ease in his peasant clothes without a weapon in his hand. “Come.”
As they moved down the street, Joanna cast a last glance back at the tired-looking children shuffling toward the factory gates.
“Flax mills,” Antryg said softly, falling into step at her side. “They’ll work till seven or eight tonight, to take advantage of the daylight. At twopence a week, the owners find it cheaper than hiring men. And then, running a machine doesn’t require strength.”
Looking up, she saw in his face the tired bitterness of one who sees suffering that he cannot alleviate and from which he has, by fate, been exempted. Thinking of those hurrying, tiny forms, she knew exactly how he felt.
He went on, “This is their technology, their industry for the betterment of all. To have no magic in politics, in industry, or in trade, to make no exceptions for the few at the expense of the many... For this world, we have forfeited what we are and could be.”
“What you could be,” Caris cut in frostily, “is what your master was—a despot who ruled this town by fear for years and who instilled in you the power to do the same.”
Antryg sighed, his hands buried in the pockets of his preposterous coat, the lines of his face settling into an expression that aged him—the weight of too great a knowledge of human sorrow. “Yes,” he agreed, his voice quiet. “But I’ve never seen that technology or this progress they keep talking about has helped those who must feed its machines. Yours is a world of technology, Joanna; it lies on the other side of a night of time that our eyes can’t pierce from here. It is worth it?”
Joanna was silent for a time, her skirt-entangled steps quick to keep pace with the longer strides of the men, fishing through the dim memories of a period in history which had always bored her. “If you mean, does it get better,” she said slowly, “yes. But that’s six, seven generations down the line. And it gets worse.”
“Much worse?” His voice was the voice of a man asking after the fate of his own children, not the sons of men and women three generations away whom he would never know.
“I think so.”
The long, sensitive mouth twisted; he walked along in silence, while the morning brightened and bells all over the city began to ring for the first church services of the day. A couple of country girls passed them, their skirts hiked up to reveal tattered petticoats underneath. One carried a bucket of milk on her head, the other a tray of fish that could be smelled across the street; neither girl looked particularly well-fed. At the end of the broad street, Joanna could see the glint of sunlight on the gray, bulky towers of the city gates and the flash of steel pikes and helmets in their deep arched shadow.
“I suppose there’s a certain economy to it,” said Antryg at last. “To sacrifice seven or eight generations for the betterment of ten, or twelve, or a hundred.”
The children of the last generations of downtrodden factory fodder, Joanna thought, had invented the atomic bomb. She said quietly, “Maybe not even that.”
His glance was puzzled and worried—not understanding how, she thought, but understanding what. They were entering the jostling crowds of the square, where half a dozen streets and alleys met before the gate. The din of hawkers, wagon wheels, crossing sweepers, and soldiers calling back and forth was tremendous and masked the soft, deep richness of his voice from any but her ears alone.
“Sometimes I think it would have been better had I not been born with the powers of a mage,” he said quietly. “I see what is happening and I know I am neither intellectually nor thaumaturgically equipped to remedy it. I know that those great, awful laws should apply to all, without exception. And yet, in individual cases—it seems different then.”
Without warning, the strange despair that Joanna had felt two or three times in the last weeks washed over her heart. He was right, she thought—not only about his world, but about her own. She felt suddenly isolated by the pointlessness of it all. This world, working to become what hers suddenly seemed to her to be—colorless, alienated, so impersonal that she herself could disappear and it would be days before her closest friend and her boyfriend—she shied again from thinking of him as her lover—knew she was even gone....
Though the warm brilliance of the daylight did not fade, it seemed as if all color, all animation had been drained from it, turning it into a tawdry carnival of pointless despair. Ahead of them, the city gates reared up at the end of the street, a clumsy monolith of dingy stone surmounted by a tarnished clock and cones of moldering slate. All the weariness of the last twenty-four hours descended crushingly on her shoulders. She could see the sasenna standing in the gatehouse shadows now, their black uniforms bearing the red sun-seal of the Church; with them were men in the gray, straitlaced clothing of the Witchfinders. She remembered the man Peelbone, and sudden panic clutched her heart.
But before she could speak, Caris balked and drew back suddenly into the mouth of a narrow lane. Under the grime and faked sores, she saw his handsome face and turned pale. His voice was breathless, “I don’t like it.”
Joanna shook her head, glad her own terrors were vindicated by the instincts of the warrior.
“We can hide in the quarter of the Old Believers,” Caris went on hoarsely. “They’ll know who I am.”
“Don’t be silly.” Antryg ducked into the lane at his side. Joanna could see his face, like the younger man’s, suddenly clammy with moisture. “Not finding us on the roads, they’ll concentrate on the ghetto now.” There was something else in his voice, something that she didn’t bother to identify through that queer feeling of panic.
Caris went on, his voice stumbling, “We can’t escape. They have the Council; they’re destroying all the wizards. We could have gotten out—I was going to use a spell to make them ignore us—it was one of the few magics I could do. But now...” He paused, his breath coming fast, as if he fought a panic of his own. “Let’s go back.” He started to move down the lane, and Antryg caught his arm in that surprising grip.
“No,” the mage said.
Furious, Caris dragged at his smock for his pistol; Antryg caught his other hand.
“It’s left you, hasn’t it?” he said softly. “Your magic.”
Caris’ eyes shifted. “No. Now move or I’ll...”
“You’ll what? Shoot me? Fifty feet from the guards at the city gate?”
They stood nearly br
east to breast, the warrior in his filthy smock staring into the mage’s bespectacled eyes in baffled, unreasoning rage. Then his mouth twisted, and his hand plunged for the knife in his boot. Joanna, watching, felt queerly distant from both of them, as if it were all happening to strangers and there would be no consequences. She wondered if the stew at the inn had given her dysentery and these were its opening stages, wondered if she would die of it and, if she died, if she would care. But even as Antryg caught Caris’s knife hand, a cry in the street behind them snagged at her attention, though it, like everything else, seemed unimportant now.
Looking out, she saw that a lady, in a spell of crooked humor, had flung a halfpenny for one of the little crossing sweepers under the hooves of an oncoming dray. The boy had made an ill-timed dive for the coin and was now sitting on the edge of the flagway, clutching his bleeding leg and screaming while the drayman shouted at him and passers-by turned aside unheeding.
Something within her told Joanna that she should feel something, do something, but it was as unreal as a scene on television. Her head felt strange, as if with hunger, though she had a weird sense that she could eat for hours without filling the gray emptiness of her soul.
At the gates, the sasenna had closed around a young man in the long black gown and braided hair of an Old Believer.
Caris, looking dully past Antryg’s shoulder, said, “It’s Treman. One of the mages... It’ll never work! We’ll be taken....”
“We won’t,” said Antryg quietly, seizing the young sasennan by the shoulder and steering him out of the alleyway, “because we’re not using magic to get by the guards. Don’t you understand? You’re not the only one whose magic has left you. You’re not the only one who feels this despair.”
The Silent Tower Page 17
