The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  Caris blinked at him, struggling in his mind. “What?”

  Antryg hauled the young man’s arm around his shoulder. “Lean on me,” he said softly. “You’re drunk.”

  “It’ll never...”

  “I’ll knock you over the head and carry you if you don’t do as I say.”

  Caris made one indignant move to struggle, then shook his head, as if he suddenly realized the perilous stupidity of such a display of temper. He slumped against the taller man’s shoulder, his head lolling. “I—I don’t know what’s come over me,” he whispered. Joanna, clutching the bundle that now looked more than ever unmistakably sword-shaped, fell into step on his other side. “It’s as if...”

  “I don’t either,” said the mage softly, “but whatever it is, it has come over the guards, too.”

  “It can’t have.” Caris managed a convincing stagger, and clutched at the mage’s arm. “It’s only because my magic is fading. It’s been fading for weeks. It hasn’t anything to do with anyone else.”

  As they approached the shadows of the gate, Joanna felt almost ill with despair, knowing they would be searched. Even if the Inquisition did not take her, it would certainly take her companions. She would be left stranded in this world, with its filth and peril, unable to make her living, unable to return home.... Tears of fright and misery blurred her vision. She felt an almost uncontrollable urge to break away and bolt back to the sheltering shadows of the alleyways, and only some small, illogical corner of her that trusted Antryg’s judgment kept her moving toward the massed sasenna in the echoing, stony darkness of the gate.

  They were still gathered around the man Treman, who was looking terrified and at the same time in the grip of listless apathy. With a sudden oath, one of the guards struck him across the face. The other guards, watching this scene, paid scant attention to the cart and foot traffic clattering in and out of the gates behind them. The shadows were cold; by contrast, the sun on the causeway beyond, when the three fugitives reached it, was oppressively hot. Gnats hummed drearily over the marshes; the sun was blinding on the water. Joanna, Antryg, and Caris were some hundred feet beyond the gates before Joanna even realized they had successfully escaped the town.

  “You feel it, too, don’t you, Joanna?” Antryg asked quietly, as they lost themselves among the shuffling crowd of the city’s poor who came and went on the marsh road, to cut hay or fish for their food among the pools. “And have done so for the last several weeks.”

  Joanna nodded, puzzled that he should know. Caris, the gates safely past, removed his arm from his Antryg’s shoulders and took the bundle of weapons from Joanna. He remained walking between them, looking baffled and strained.

  Antryg went on, “I don’t suppose that woman back there would ever have thrown a coin under the horses’ feet that way—even if the thought had crossed her mind; either inherent decency or, at the very least, fear of what her friends would think of her would have stayed her hand. Ordinarily the boy would have had more sense than to go after it and more skill than to get trampled.” He looked from one to the other of them, his head cocked to one side, like a gray stork’s. “Don’t you see?”

  A passing troop of mounted sasenna kicked dust over them; it clung like flour to their sweaty faces. Joanna saw one tired-looking old farm woman who barely raised her head as the riders bore down on her; and the boy who was with her saw them coming for some moments before rousing himself to pull his mother out of the way. Joanna shook her head, feeling strangely isolated and uncaring.

  “It eats life,” the wizard said softly. “It eats magic. It leeches the life-force, the energy that holds all life together, from every living thing and leaves in its place only the weary wondering of where it has gone.”

  “What does?” Caris asked, a kind of fear struggling against the uncaring dullness in his eyes.

  “That,” Antryg said, “is what I mean to find out.”

  Chapter XI

  THEY TRAVELED FOR three days, through the green and empty hill country that Caris called the Sykerst, and into the farmlands beyond.

  The queer, terrible sense of deadness did not pass off until sometime after noon of the first day. Joanna, asleep in the shelter of the last haystack of the lowlands before the high ground began, felt the fading in her confused dream of being married to Gary, of protesting, But it was all a mistake! I don’t want to be married to anybody, and of Gary’s smug expression as he said, I’m sorry, babe, but you did marry me.... As if a fever had been lifted from her, she wept. She felt a hand, large but very light of touch, brush her hair comfortingly as she sank into deeper sleep.

  Later, as they resumed their walk through the stuffy, clinging heat of the last of the day, she asked Antryg, “Did it affect your magic, as it did that of Caris?”

  “I felt it,” he admitted, producing three apples from the pockets of his trailing coat-skirts and tossing two of them to his companions as they walked. “It didn’t bleed all the hope from me—madness has certain advantages.”

  Joanna frowned up at him. “You mean magic is—is predicated on hope? Because I felt, more than anything, that was what was taken from me—the hope of anything.”

  He regarded her with quirked eyebrows for a moment, surprised by her understanding. “Hope,” he said, “and belief in life. We move blindly from second to second through time. Hope, and magic, both involve the casting forward of the soul. In a way, both magic and hope are a kind of madness.”

  “Madness also has the advantage,” Caris said, shifting the set of the pistol belted under his faded peasant smock, “of cloaking things which you find it more convenient not to explain—like the fact that you knew of the coming of the abominations, and why you, of all wizards, don’t lose your powers to this... whatever it is.”

  “Handy, isn’t it?” Antryg grinned, pleased. He finished devouring the core of his apple and flicked the stem into the nodding weeds of the roadside ditch. “Couldn’t have happened better if I’d caused it myself.”

  Caris’ coffee-brown eyes narrowed, and Joanna had to look away and purse her lips tightly against an involuntary smile.

  “The thing that worries me,” the wizard went on after a moment, “or one of the things that worry me about that, is that it happens everywhere. What about the children in the factories? There are enough accidents without that—uncaringness.”

  Joanna, who had lived all her life in a world poised a button push away from destruction, shivered. “Come to think of it,” she said after a moment, “where I work—if they don’t can me for being absent without calling in—on the days this whatever-it-is happened, there would always be zillions of stupid errors in documentation and programs.”

  “Documentation?”

  Joanna hesitated, wondering how she could best explain computers to a wizard, much less to one from a world that had only begun connecting electricity with lightning. But no one, she reasoned, who wasn’t interested in everything would have become a wizard in the first place; so she launched ahead and for several miles expounded upon the intricacies of programming, languages, CP/M pixels, ROM, RAM, mainframes, micros, hard disks, and floppies, while the dove-colored summer evening darkened to ultramarine and the dry-grass sweetness of the hill winds tugged at her hair.

  “You are saying, then, that these—these computers—think?” Caris asked doubtfully. He had abandoned his guarding position at Antryg’s back and walked now at Joanna’s side, the bundle of their possessions still over his shoulder and the butt of the pistol visible against his hard-muscled belly through the half-open smock. He sounded worried.

  Joanna shook her head. “They can be programmed to reproduce many of the processes of linear thinking,” she said, kicking aside an encumbering fold of her petticoat, which persisted in tangling around her ankles. “That is, any chain of thought can be broken down into a hundred tiny yes-or-no decisions—if A, then go to B, if not A, then go to C, and C will tell you what to do from there.”

  Caris frowned, puzzled, but Antr
yg said, “Rather like a music box—either a key is struck or it’s silent—or the punched cards they rig in automatic series to change the weft patterns in jacquard looms.”

  “Since computers work very fast—and we’re talking a hundredth or thousandth of a second here—” She shied from explaining nanoseconds to people who, she was fairly sure, didn’t work habitually in units smaller than hours. “—it has the appearance of operating like thought. But for the most part, they’ll do exactly what you tell them to. It’s both the advantage and the disadvantage of computers. You always know where you are with a computer, unlike a person—but they don’t care what they do. They’ll sit there printing out gibberish for hours, if you make the wrong request, give away state secrets to anyone who asks, or help you steal, if you know the right entry code—and any good hacker can break an entry code.”

  “Steal?” The sasennan’s frown deepened. As soon as it had begun to grow dark, he had paused by one of the thin streams that trickled down from the hills, had washed the counterfeit sores from his face, and had rid himself of the faint, pale stubble of his beard with a razor from his belt purse. In the lingering dusk, the dark circles around his eyes had deepened almost to bruises. Joanna wondered if he had slept when they had taken refuge in the haystack for a few hours’ rest or if he thought it behooved him still to keep an eye on Antryg.

  “I thought you said those things were only boxes that did not move.”

  She shrugged. “They don’t have to. It’s all done over the telephone. Everything in our civilization is. A friend of mine at San Serano broke the ordering and shipping codes on the San Serano mainframe; I suspect he also used telephone modems to break the shipping codes on some of the companies that use computerized ordering systems where we get our supplies. Now and then I’ll be thumbing through the mainframe and find somebody’s put through an order from San Serano for some kind of equipment—like extra disk drives—and then later find that the order has been pulled from the file. When an order’s pulled from a computer file, it’s gone; it’s as if it never existed. It’s only light, after all—and when light’s gone it leaves no tracks. Presumably, using modems, the record of the transaction can be removed from the shipper’s files as well. That way Gary can walk off with an extra disk drive—or a whole computer, if he wanted to—and nobody’s the wiser, because there’s no record of the thing ever having existed.”

  The affronted morality of years of warrior discipline was in Caris’ voice. “He is a thief without even the courage of a common burglar,” he said.

  Joanna nodded in agreement. They stepped down into the weed-grown roadside ditch to let a shepherd and his flock pass them, a bleating, jostling confusion of wool and dust. “Except that he’d say that the companies have a profit margin for theft included in their annual budgets, so nobody’s really losing anything.”

  “Except Gary himself.” Hands in his pockets, shift ruffles like a shabby flower in the evening gloom, Antryg turned away from his delighted contemplation of the interplay between sheep and dogs to regard his companions. “And what he loses is the part of himself that honors the rights of others and honors his own integrity.”

  “Gary,” Joanna said after a moment, “wouldn’t really understand that integrity—which is free, and therefore cheap—isn’t worth a two-thousand-dollar disk drive.” She stepped back into the smelly dust cloud that hung over the road, kilting up her skirts into her belt as she had seen the farm women do, and resumed her tired walk north.

  Much later, when Joanna looked back on those few days, it was with a kind of mild surprise at herself for the ease with which she slipped into companionship with both captor and captive. Timid by nature, she had always harbored an uneasy distrust of men, regarding them as an alien species who dealt with women in the relationship of users and used. But neither of the two men seemed to regard her as anything other than a comrade on the road, Caris because he was too single-mindedly intent on watching Antryg, and Antryg because it would never have occurred to him to deal with anyone except on that person’s own terms.

  “I don’t know what game he’s playing,” Caris said, as he and Joanna shared a bucket of wash water drawn from the horse trough of the posting house stable where the three of them had slept the night. “He could perfectly well have escaped last night.” He folded up his shaving razor and returned it to his belt purse, then doused the water angrily over his face and head and shook out his wet, fair hair Joanna, at Caris’ instructions, had gamely taken a shift at watch the previous night and had fallen asleep ten minutes into it; Caris, she knew, had waked, sat in the dark hayloft for half an hour in pistol-clutching surveillance on the sleeping Antryg, and had dropped off as well. Antryg had waked both of them at dawn.

  Joanna tried but failed to stifle her grin. “But he would have missed breakfast,” she said, providing what Antryg’s explanation would surely be. All she got from the disgruntled Caris was a sour look.

  “He has his own reasons for wanting to go to Angelshand.” His glowering eyes sought the tall, loose-limbed form of the wizard as it emerged from the back door of the posting inn, half a loaf of rye bread and a hunk of cheese in hand. Then he wiped his hands on the coarse linsey-woolsey of his peasant smock, its sleeves turned up to reveal the old, white scars which criss-crossed his muscular forearms, and brushed away a stray bit of hay. Joanna had quickly discovered that hay was surprisingly persistent stuff. “It’s easy to believe in his innocence,” he said after a moment. “I did, myself, if for no other reason than that he seems too scatterbrained to be devious. But he brought you here for a reason, Joanna, and it may be that he only appears so docile because he hasn’t had the opportunity to carry you off.”

  As Antryg came up to them, Joanna was obliged to press her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing at the mental picture of the bespectacled wizard in his billowing, too-large black coat dashing away on foot across the hills with her thrown like a movie heroine over his shoulder. Caris, to judge by his expression, did not share her amusement.

  In the dry warmth of the morning, the smell of the new-baked bread the wizard carried was almost painful and the drift of scent from the doors of the posting house kitchen like a glimpse of heaven. Caris had relieved him of what little money was left of Nandiharrow’s small hoard, but it only amounted to a few coppers; Antryg had earned supper last night, breakfast this morning, and a bed in the hayloft of the stables by telling fortunes in the posting house, to Caris’ considerable disgust.

  “Lady Rosamund was right,” he had said bitterly, watching the wizard bent over the fat palm of a merchant who had come in on the mailcoach. “A dog wizard!”

  Dog wizard or not, Joanna thought the following evening, it did pay for supper, and she privately considered that it ill-behooved Caris to complain about it.

  The day had been an exhausting one. Though she was gradually getting used to walking all day, she still felt stiff and tired and miserably footsore. Her face, arms, and shoulders were sunburned. The situation was not helped by sleeping in hay for the past two nights. Thank God, she thought, with a twinge of amusement at herself, I don’t have allergies—that’s probably something selected against in the evolution of heroines. Though the hills of the Sykerst were empty, tenanted only by sheep, the road was fairly well-traveled, with pack trains carrying clay down to the pottery works in Kymil and farm carts from the lowlands beyond. At long intervals, the mailcoach would clatter past in a huge cloud of choking dust, an enormous vehicle drawn by a six-horse hitch, rattling with brass and glass windows and crammed with passengers—farmers in serge, black-clothed clerks in wide-brimmed hats, or harrassed-looking women of the poorer classes in faded print gowns and bonnets. Sometimes a carriage would pass them, with a coachman on the box and a couple of footmen hanging on behind, or small, lightly slung chaises, with postillions riding the horses instead of driving them.

  Only once had they left the road, when a company of sasenna had ridden by, clothed in smart black uniforms braided in gol
d and heavily armed. As they’d climbed back onto the road again, Caris said, “The Prince Regent’s men.”

  “Are you surprised?” Antryg asked, dusting off his velvet coat skirts. They had taken refuge in the shadows of one of the spindly clumps of birches which were beginning to grow with greater and greater frequency beside the road as it came down off the bare backbone of the hills and wended its way toward the farming and woodland country closer to Angelshand. “He has always hated the mages; it shouldn’t come as a shock that he’s sent his private bodyguard to join the hunt.”

  Caris’ beautiful lips set into a grim line, and he felt for the reassurance of the pistol in his smock. Further down the road, a farmer and his young wife were trying to coax their donkey out of the ditch into which they’d scrambled for safety at the troop’s approach. Joanna was interested to notice that others beside the mageborn had reason to fear the Regent’s men.

  Seated now with her back to the stone chimney breast of the posting house, she watched Antryg peer with his cracked old quizzing glass at the dregs of a dowager’s tea. The smoky shadows of the lamplight played unsteadily over his features and put a flickering embroidery of shadow on the woman’s round cheeks from the lace flaps of her cap. Behind them, the other passengers of the mail coach crowded in an interested knot, drinking their evening ale and listening with the surreptitious fascination that even nonbelievers have in the words of oracles. Joanna couldn’t hear what Antryg was telling the woman, but a stout man in a suit of dark-blue superfine who seemed to be her husband laughed and said, “Mind, Emmie, you’re not believing all that wizardy twiddle, are you?”

  “Tisn’t twiddle.” The woman took the teacup from Antryg and held it defensively to her pouter-pigeon bosom, as if the future itself, and not merely its reflection, were held within its leaves.

  Another man in a farmer’s rough smock laughed. “Pshaw!” Joanna had seen the word written in novels of the British variety but had never actually heard anyone say it. “I went to one of them wizard fellows once...”