The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  “Try mercury or arsenic,” Joanna said. “They’re metals. No matter what kind of organisms the things are, a heavy metal should at least slow them down. Whatever they smelled in the dead abomination must be a concentrate of something from the cow’s blood, to bring them so fast that they ignored everything else.”

  Caris shook his head. “One of them attacked me within feet of the carcass.”

  “Did it?” Antryg inquired suddenly. “As I remember, it attacked your sword. Which, of course, was smeared with fluid from the thing’s body. It didn’t leap after you, once it had the sword. And I’ll tell you something else. Whatever they look for in blood, I think they also look for it in earth. At least the stream bank was all chewed with the things tunnelings.”

  “A trace mineral?” Joanna suggested thoughtfully. She scratched at a fragment of hay in her hair—very different, suddenly, Caris thought, from the painfully shy girl who had accompanied them up from Kymil. She was not, after all, merely a talker to machines, and he wondered suddenly if it was this quality, this knowledge, for which Antryg had kidnapped her. “Blood is mostly water, salt, proteins, and some trace minerals and it carries oxygen. Obviously it isn’t water they want or they’d have been in the stream itself. It might be nitrogen....”

  “Cerdic.” Antryg turned to the Prince, who had stood throughout this with a look of mystification on his round, perspiring face. “Did there used to be a salt lick down by the stream?”

  The young man looked blank. “Dashed if I know. Does it matter?”

  “A salt lick?” Joanna asked, puzzled.

  “Yes—a natural outcropping of salt in the ground. There’s a trampled patch on the bank that looks as if it’s where the cattle regularly came down....”

  At the Prince’s signal, the coachman jumped down from the wagon and approached, casting a wary look at Antryg and a disapproving one at Joanna’s jeans-clad legs. “Oh, aye,” he said, when asked. “That’s what the cows were doing in the meadow in the first place, after that good-for-nothing Joe left the field gates open day before yesterday. The cowman drives ’em down there regular, and a job he has keeping ’em out of the hay.”

  “Well,” said Antryg simply, “the lick’s gone, now. The whole bank’s tunneled in.”

  “That’s probably when they started feeding on the cows,” Joanna said. She turned back to the baffled-looking Cerdic. “I think that’s your answer,” she said, and abruptly, as if she heard and feared the quiet authority in her own voice, her old shyness returned. Diffident but resolute, she continued, “Heavily concentrated salt—as much of it as you can get—with enough water to make it liquid and as much mercury and arsenic as you have. If it doesn’t kill them, it should slow them down enough to be shoveled into the limekiln.”

  Cerdic caught her hand between his two massively mailed ones and said what no knight in gilded armor ever said to any lady of any legend. “My dear girl, you’re a genius!”

  Joanna blushed furiously and shook her head. “It just took breaking it down into subroutines,” she explained self-deprecatingly. “I mean—that’s how all programmers think.”

  The Prince frowned. “Programmer—is that a sort of wizard?”

  Antryg, seeing Joanna’s confusion overcoming her, put a comforting arm around her shoulders and said, “Yes. And now,” he added gravely, “I hope you mean to arrest us, because that would mean we could stop running and have some breakfast.”

  With equally sober mien, the Prince began to bow, and Caris, the coachman, and Antryg all barely caught him in time, before he overbalanced in the weight of the armor. He substituted a graceful gesture of his arm. “My lord wizard,” he said, “please consider yourself under arrest.”

  “So what happens now?”

  Antryg turned from the long rectangle of the window’s shadowy luminescence. Far off, a line of smoke marked the first of the limekilns firing up.

  “It seems to have worked,” he said and smiled a welcome as Joanna gathered up the handfuls of green sprig-muslin skirts and petticoats and rustled her way across the parquet of the drawing room floor. The rooms the Prince had given them at Devilsgate Manor looked east over a short stretch of informal garden to the woods; at this hour, though the greenery outside was still spangled with the last brightness of the evening sun, the rooms themselves were growing dim. “And he was quite right, my dear. It was a stroke of genius, subroutines or no subroutines.”

  Joanna shook her head again, as self-conscious over the praise as she was over the ribbon-edged flounces and low-cut neckline of her gown. She still wondered who the Prince was in the habit of keeping spare gowns around for. “It comes from breaking everything down for programming,” she said. “Talking to a machine, you have to think like one—choose one alternative or the other, decide A on what grounds, decide B on what grounds, if not B, what’s C... everything in a million little increments.” She made a move to sit on the edge of a nearby chair back and gave it up as the unwary move earned her a poke under the ribcage from the boning in the gown’s bodice. “It may be slower than talking to a person; but if you do everything right, you always know where you are.”

  His gray eyes were kind as he heard the years of buried uncertainties in her words, but he only said, “A little like magic, then. To weave a spell, one must know everything about the object of the spell. Thank you,” he added softly, “for taking over there. Because you did keep me from having to make a very awkward choice.”

  Joanna blushed, confused and embarrassed by praise. Fed, washed, and rested, clothed in a gown far more elegant and twice as uncomfortable as her former peasant disguise, she still found herself aching from the hardships of flight. Her wrists still hurt from the kick of the pistol, reminding her of what she had done not forty-eight hours before. That, like the cumulative exhaustion, was something she knew already would take more than a few hours’ rest to cure. In a sense it would never be cured—it would always remain something she had done.

  Antryg, she was glad to see, looked better, also. He’d acquired a clean ruffled shirt, though he still wore his long-skirted velvet coat and borrowed jeans. The wound on his face was visibly less raw than it had been.

  “Any programmer could have figured it out,” she protested again. “And you were right—we had no idea of what those things could or might turn into.” She hesitated. “And we have no guarantee there won’t be others, do we?”

  He shook his head—there passed across the back of his eyes some haunted darkness of knowledge, as if he guessed unthinkable possibilities. His voice was very low. “No.”

  “What happens now?”

  Antryg sighed and seemed to brush aside the half-contemplated horrors. “I suppose I could read the cards to find out,” he said. “Though the cards are a bit dangerous in themselves.”

  “Because you can be traced by the Council?”

  “No—they’re no more magic than dreaming is, really. But the cards have a nasty habit of telling one things one doesn’t really wish to know.”

  Joanna leaned against the opposite jamb of the tall windows and ran her hand down the smooth, gilded molding. “But then you can prepare for catastrophe, if one’s coming up.”

  “Perhaps—unless, like war or jealousy, it’s the preparation which triggers it. It’s easier to let go and deal with things as they arise.”

  “Maybe,” she said, with a rueful smile. “But letting go of things and letting events take their course has always been the hardest thing for me to do.” She shook her head, the damp, trailing ends of her hair brushing against her bare shoulders, brown and then white with the changed neckline. “It probably sounds pretty stupid, because I know there’s something terrible going on, something evil, but all I really want is out.”

  He smiled. “It isn’t stupid,” he said gently. “From time to time, I find myself wishing I were back in the Tower, not because it was comfortable—which it wasn’t—but because it was peaceful, and all my things are there, and I was safe.”

  Sh
e remembered her thought on the island, just before she pulled the trigger—If I didn’t have a gun, I wouldn’t have to do this.

  “Are we safe?” she asked.

  He considered the matter. “I shouldn’t think so,” he replied judiciously after a moment. “I’m certainly not, and you...” There was a long pause, during which, looking up into those mild gray eyes, she noted that they were in truth a very gray blue, flecked with white and hazel-yellow, which gave them their silvery cast. There was a triangular pucker of skin, like a small V, among the crisscrossed wrinkles below the left one.

  He sighed and said, half to himself, “I wish I knew.”

  Joanna reflected that she was beginning to feel like the poor schlemazl in North by Northwest, kidnapped and haled all over the countryside, being shot at by strangers without any idea of what was happening, and on top of it all...

  There was, she realized, another part to that analogy.

  For a long time, their eyes held.

  She thought, with a curious sense of shock that was not surprise, I expected it to be different than this. For a time it seemed to her that neither of them breathed—that it was impossible that the only point of contact between their two bodies was where her petticoats brushed against his booted ankle in a froth of voile. Part of her mind was saying in its usual cool and practical tones, This is ridiculous. I don’t do things like this—while another part said, I want him.

  For a time the sooty-gray shadows of the empty drawing room were like completely still water, fathoms deep and silent but for the distant chatter of the birds outside. The smell of the woods, of grass damp from last night’s rain and of the far-off acrid smoke of the burning kilns, came to her through the open windows, mixed with the faint scent of soap from his flesh and hair. He stood so still that one facet of the crystal earring he wore held a gleam of the last light from outside like a tiny mirror, steely and unmoving in the deepening gloom; the only thing that stirred was the white rim of light on the ruffles of his shirt with the rise and fall of his breath.

  Everything seemed incredibly clear to her, but without pattern. It had nothing in common with her encounters with Gary and her nervous weighing and reweighing of pro and con. She only knew that she wanted him and knew, looking up into the wide, black pupils of his eyes, that he wanted her.

  He turned abruptly, almost angrily, away and walked from the windows into the twilight cavern of the room. “I will not do this,” he said softly. She could hear the faint tremor of his deep voice. “You are dependent on me and under my protection in this world. I won’t take advantage of that.”

  His back was to her, the diffuse whiteness of the fading day putting a sheen like pewter on the velvet of his shoulders. She knew well enough that he was conscious of her eyes upon his back. She was aware of her own feelings less clearly, shocked and appalled, not by them, but by their strength. Nothing she had ever experienced with Gary, not even sex, came anywhere near this need—not to have, but to give.

  After a moment he turned and walked silently from the room.

  “You can’t pretend you don’t know what he’s done!” Caris swung around in his pacing to face the Prince behind his inlaid fruitwood desk. “It is he and not the Church or the Inquisition of your cousin who is the true enemy of the Council!”

  Prince Cerdic was silent. His round, smooth, white hands with their old-fashioned rings of gold and rose crystal were folded on the marquetry before him, his painted mouth settled and still. His study, with its old fashioned linenfold paneling and coffered ceiling, looked north; through the tall windows, Caris could see in the distance against the milky twilight sky the first tall outliers of the Devil’s Road itself, crowning the bare top of the hill—standing-stones, such as had guarded the way from Kymil to the Silent Tower long before either city or Tower had been built. Yet the long, silent line of stone sentries led from nowhere to nowhere, traversed only by the wind and by the queer, traveling energies of the earth that only the mages felt.

  Caris was coming to see that it was no accident that Prince Cerdic, out of all the manors available to the Imperial Family, had chosen this as his principal seat. Doggedly, he went on, “It is Antryg who kidnapped the Archmage and who gave the Church and the Witchfinders their chance to announce that the mages were plotting against the Empire—gave them their chance to arrest the mageborn without fear of reprisals! Maybe he did it for that reason—maybe for others. He is responsible for the abominations—”

  “There’s nothing to show that,” the Prince protested.

  “Then how has he known where they would be? How does he make guesses about what they are or could become?”

  The Prince still said nothing, only sat, among his gold and shellwork incense-burners, while the images of the twenty-one Old Gods watched his round, pink satin back. Like many converts, Prince Cerdic was more devout than most Old Believers Caris had met; he was the only one the young man had seen who had statues of the Old Gods, instead of the elaborate calligraphy talismans of their names pasted to the walls with which most Old Believers contented themselves. As he had told the Prince about the abomination in the swamp, about his grandfather’s revelations on the fallen stone, and about seeing the old man’s glove in Antryg’s room as the mad wizard vanished through the Void into that other bizarre and terrible world, he felt the eyes of those small idols upon him—dog-headed Lancres, Tambet with the baby Signius at her breast, Kahieret the God of the Mages with his stork’s head rising from the long black robes of a wizard, the horned Dead God wrapped in his burial shroud....

  “I need an introduction to the Court,” Caris said quietly. “If I bring Antryg to your cousin the Regent openly before witnesses—if I am able to leave freely—the Witchfinders cannot deny either his capture or his confession. They are not interested in truth, but only in what story will best serve their ends; allow them simply to destroy Antryg, and we will never find the Archmage, nor restore the Council’s power.”

  Cerdic rubbed his smooth chin with one lace-gloved hand. “But maybe he is telling you the truth,” he said. “The mageborn understand so much more of what is going on than mere mortals like you and me....”

  “The fact that they do does not mean he speaks the truth!” Caris almost shouted. “He keeps claiming that the one who has done this evil, who steals the life from the souls of the land, who calls the abominations through the Void, and who kidnapped the Archmage and brought the woman Joanna here is not him, but someone else. But according to the Archmage, there is no one else with that understanding of the Void!”

  The light of the dozen candles illuminating the opulent study flickered in a rim of fire over the embroidery that laced the Prince’s carnation-colored coat. Behind him, on the shelves with the idols of the Old Gods, Caris could see old and crumbling tomes of magic. Some he recognized from his grandfather’s study in the Mages’ Yard; others he knew only by the sneers of the Council wizards, volumes of piesog and earth-magic and granny-lore, the compendia of every quack and dog wizard for five hundred years. The Prince moved uncomfortably in his velvet chair, his diamond earrings casting a sprinkle of brightness over his shoulders and his pink-and-white cravat.

  “In the first place, I’m not sure either my introduction or my patronage would do your cause any good,” he said. “My cousin has always been insanely suspicious of everyone. Of late, those suspicions have begun to turn against me as well. It’s one reason I’m here and not at Court, doing what I can to help the mageborn. He has me watched in the capital. It’s absurd, because technically I am his heir, but I was beginning to fear for my safety.

  “But in any case...” He frowned and smoothed the lace of his glove. “It is not for us to judge the mageborn. They were our first priests, servants of the Old Gods. They still commune with their ancient powers, beyond the ken of you and me.”

  Impatiently, Caris began, “That’s nonsense! There aren’t more than a handful of mages who are Old Believers.”

  “No matter what they call them,�
� Cerdic said gravely, “the powers they exercise are still the powers of the Old Ones. It is not for any mere mortal to disturb the great webs of destiny, not even for motives, which they themselves deem laudable. They say my uncle, the Emperor, had a great deal of respect for Suraklin and went to his prison cell many times to visit him after he’ was taken; but still, he took it upon himself to destroy a mage, and great evil fell upon him after.”

  “Twenty years later?”

  The Prince’s soft mouth pursed, giving his otherwise open countenance a mulish appearance. Caris, though he knew this young man was the second heir to the Realm after the mad Regent, was conscious of an overwhelming desire to knock that pomaded head against the wall.

  “He ought never to have meddled in the Dark Mage’s affairs. Woe comes to them who hold the mageborn in light regard.”

  Caris was beginning to understand the viewpoint of those nobles who preferred the Regent Pharos’ sadistic madness to this kind of blind obstinacy. Antryg, he realized, knew how to pick his friends.

  Slowly, he said, “Woe certainly came to those who held Suraklin in light regard. But that didn’t mean that he should not have been stopped. And Antryg is his student, his heir, and privy to all his black arts.”

  Cerdic leaned across the variegated inlay of the desk surface, to catch Caris’ hand. There was that maddening, ethereal kindness in his eyes as he said earnestly, “That is only what you believe, as an outsider looking in.”

  “I am not...” began Caris indignantly, pulling his hand away, but Cerdic’s soft, rather high voice rode right over his words.

  “It is not ours to judge—not yours, as a sasennan sworn to serve, and not mine, though I am of high rank in the things of this world. Ours is only to serve the mageborn in whatever way we can. I have put a light carriage, a phaeton, at Lord Antryg’s disposal, with letters of credit for changing horses from here to Angelshand.”