The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

“Of course,” Antryg said. “That’s been the—” He stopped himself as Joanna’s eyebrows came together, then went on quickly, “He’s come very close to it twice. As for what we’re dealing with here...” He shook his head. “There seem to be a lot of events unrelated to one another, except by juxtaposition in time—Narwahl’s death, your kidnapping, the Prince’s marriage...”

  “Or things that happened twenty-five years ago,” she said, remembering the old woman in the prison. At his tricks again, that one had said, rocking back and forth, and for the dozenth time Joanna found herself reminded that what Suraklin had known, Antryg undoubtedly knew. There was no way he could have murdered Narwahl—on the night of the physician’s death, as far as Joanna could calculate, they had all been sleeping in the hayloft of some posting inn on the Kymil road.... Or could he?

  She wondered suddenly whether an examination would reveal wizards’ marks in that stuffy, blood-smelling room.

  She was aware that Antryg had fallen silent and was looking at her with wary uncertainty in his eyes.

  “How did you know I was there, by the way? Thinking about it, I was desperately glad to see you, but I don’t think I was surprised; and now I realize I should have been.”

  “Not really.” His earring winked in the tangled mane of his hair as he turned his head. “I was looking for mages, remember. Considering the current situation, the logical place to look was St. Cyr. I was loitering around inconspicuously outside when they brought you in. I assume Caris sent you to Narwahl’s.”

  “How did... ?” she began, and then remembered saying to the Prince that she knew what the neighbors had found in that hideous upper room.

  “Will that screw you up?” she asked after a moment. “All the mages getting away from St. Cyr—or did they all get away?”

  He shook his head. “I imagine most of them did. I’ve spoken to Pharos about releasing the others. There will be time enough to find them and to speak to them, after I’ve seen the Emperor’s rooms.”

  “Will having them loose increase your danger?” she asked, and he shook his head absently. “Then you know which one to be afraid of?”

  He looked quickly at her, his eyes suddenly wide in the dim gleam from the court below, as if he had suddenly seen that he’d walked into a trap. But it wasn’t a trap, she thought, baffled; she had sensed him holding her at arm’s length, picking his way carefully over conversationally shifty ground. He was braced for something, she knew, but she only asked, “Why are you afraid of me?”

  He started to say something, then checked himself; for some moments, the little room under the eaves was quiet, save for the noises that drifted up from the court below through the opened casements and the far-off creak of some servant’s foot elsewhere in the palace. Then he changed his mind and said, “Like the Prince, I’m afraid of a good many things. I’ve spent most of my life terrified of a man who’s been dead for years.”

  He got to his feet and helped her to hers. The vagrant foxfire drifted after them as he led her to the door. She paused in its darkness, looking up at him, knowing he was evading her and coming up with an uncomfortable number of reasons why. But none of them accounted for the care he’d taken of her, none of them accounted for risking his life that afternoon to save her from the Inquisition.

  She said, “I get the feeling that there’s a pattern here somewhere—as you said, some connection between the fading and the abominations and between Narwahl’s death and the Archmage disappearing and my being kidnapped. It’s all subroutines of a program I can’t see. I understand the kind of thing you hope to learn from seeing Narwahl’s experiments—though they looked to me like perfectly straightforward let’s-make-electricity stuff—but what do you hope to learn from seeing the Emperor’s rooms?”

  He shook his head. “Confirmation, perhaps, of a theory I have.” He leaned against the doorframe, the will-o’-the-wisp light edging hair and spectacles and the curlicue line of shirt-ruffles with their snagged tangle of quizzing glass and beads. “And maybe the answer to something that’s puzzling me very much.”

  She didn’t really expect an answer, but asked, “What?”

  After a long moment’s hesitation, Antryg seemed to come to some decision within himself. “Why they would send him mad, instead of killing him.”

  At two in the morning the terrible, draining deadness began again and tortured Joanna’s exhausted dreams with visions of old Minhyrdin until dawn.

  Chapter XVI

  “THEY SAID IT WAS a judgment, you know.” The Prince Regent’s pale, shifty eyes flicked from the parklike vistas of topiaried garden visible to both sides of the open coach back to the man and woman opposite him on the white velvet carriage seat. The deadness that had lasted until almost dawn had left its marks on him, adding to the keyed-up, exhausted nervousness of the previous night. His full-lipped red mouth twitched as he explained, “for his sympathy to the mages.”

  “I wouldn’t say sympathy was your father’s outstanding characteristic at my trial,” Antryg mused. “Hanged, drawn, sliced, and broken—it was years before I could contemplate chicken marinara, not that I was given the chance to, mind you. But then, he never did like me. How did it happen?”

  Pharos shook his head. “Would to God we knew,” he said, quite simply. “He woke that way one morning four years ago. He...” He swallowed, wiped his moist hands on a black silk handkerchief, and tucked it back up among the sable festoons of his sleeve lace. “We didn’t know whether it would go as suddenly as it had come—we still don’t, but back then we hoped more than we do now. He used to try and talk then, or at least it looked like talking. In the first day or so, I sometimes thought he knew me. Now...” He looked away again, over the sun-splashed morning beauty of those manicured lawns and carefully pruned groves. Then his glance, half-embarrassed and half-warning, returned unwillingly to Joanna. “When you see him,” he said carefully, “you must remember that he is a very sick man.”

  Joanna guessed what he meant and suppressed a qualm of apprehensive disgust. It interested her that he would feel enough concern for his father—who couldn’t possibly have cared one way or the other—to warn her against showing repugnance. And afraid as she had once been of him, she now felt oddly sorry for this bejeweled little pervert.

  Antryg asked, “Who were the mages who were habitually admitted to his rooms? Who would have had access to his bedroom, for instance?”

  “No one,” Pharos said promptly. “Well, they might have entered there from the rest of the suite. Rosamund Kentacre—her father dragged her there for him to convince her not to take the Council vows. Thirle, I believe...”

  “Minhyrdin?”

  Pharos sniffed. “That senile crone? My father’s interests were in magic, not particularly in those who worked it or who were at one time able to work it. The members of the Council were admitted—Salteris, of course, Lady Rosamund, Nandiharrow, Idrix of Thray, and Whitwell Simm, and you.”

  “Not me,” Antryg said. “Well, once, after I’d been elected to the Council, I had to be presented formally to him. But as I said, he never liked me.” He frowned a little. “During the Mellidane Revolts, I had the impression I was not precisely entrapped, but certainly maneuvered. He can’t have been that ignorant of what was going on. But I never understood why. From my little acquaintance with him, he was perfectly capable of it, of course....”

  “Did you know him before... ?” began Pharos, then stopped himself. “No, you couldn’t. You were Suraklin’s student. Perhaps that was the reason.” The dappling sunlight passed like a school of shining fish over his bright hair as the carriage moved through a grove of maples whose leaves were already edging with blood-red autumn flame. It was difficult to believe that beyond the park walls in three directions stretched the sprawling gray city, the dingy factories, and the crowded wharves of Angelshand.

  The strain and tiredness were apparent in the Prince’s voice as well as his face. Joanna heard the harsh, shaky shrillness of last night still there, held
rigidly in check, as it had been, she thought, for weeks—perhaps for years. After a moment, he went on, “He never would have handed down a judgment like that before—before he rode with the Archmage to Kymil, you know. He—changed afterward.”

  “If he saw anything of Suraklin’s Citadel,” Antryg murmured, “it would be surprising if he hadn’t.”

  “No.” The Prince’s voice sank. “Sometimes he spoke of it—of the things Suraklin kept in darkness, things that he bred or called up, things that he fed on the blood from his own veins....”

  Beside her, Joanna felt Antryg flinch at some memory, but he said nothing. Back in Kymil, she’d noticed the old, tiny scars that marked the veins of his arms like a junkie’s tracks.

  “But I hated him for it,” Pharos continued, “as much as I had loved him before. And I did love him. It’s strange to say, but since he has—since he has become an imbecile, oddly enough, I love him now.” He swallowed and passed his hand over his mouth, a nervous gesture. He spoke from behind the white, delicate fingers with their bitten nails, as if from behind a barrier. “They said of Suraklin that he had a terrible, almost unbelievable influence over the minds of all who had to do with him. They said he could break anyone’s mind to his bidding, if given his chance.... But looking back, I realize it was only the things that he’d seen...”

  His voice faltered. Feeling Antryg’s eyes on her, Joanna turned her head and caught again the wariness and fear that lurked in the water-gray depths. After a moment, Pharos went on, his words coming rapidly to cover old guilts. “But I was only a child and a fanciful one—I understand that now. It must have been only that I was ten...”

  “You were ten?” Joanna had been watching Pharos, but the note in Antryg’s voice drew her eyes, as if he had shouted the words instead of whispering them almost inaudibly. There was shock on his face, as if he had been physically struck—shock and a terrible intentness that Joanna was at a loss to understand.

  Pharos nodded, too sunk in private nightmares to notice the wizard’s reaction to his words, the presence of the coachman on the box, Kanner on the footman’s stand, the scrunch of the horses’ hooves and the carriage wheels on the gravel path, or Joanna. Hands pressed to his mouth, he stared out ahead of him with the glittering gaze of madness.

  “What happened?” Antryg whispered, leaning gently forward to take the Prince’s hands. He drew them down, denying Pharos that hiding place, and asked again, “What was it that happened twenty-five years ago when you were ten?”

  “Nothing.” The Prince shut his eyes, squeezing the painted lids together like a child hoping desperately to deny the reality of what he was helpless to fight. “That’s it— nothing happened.”

  “Except that you went mad.”

  “I was a child.” The words came out as if strained by main force from a throat so constricted it barely passed the air of life to his lungs. “There was nothing I could do, no one even that I could tell. I used to dream about him, after he came back, and in my dreams...” He broke off again, his hands trembling violently in Antryg’s sure, light grip. The mage said nothing, but his wide eyes were filled with horror, grief, and enlightenment—not for the Prince’s sake, but as if, looking into the younger man’s madness, he had seen the terrifying reflection of his own.

  Blurtingly, the Prince sobbed, “In my dreams he was not my father!” Tears tracked down through the heavy paste of makeup; he wrenched his hands from Antryg’s and fumbled for his handkerchief again, his body racked by tremors of grief and horror he could not stop. “I was only ten,” he repeated, “and there was no one I could tell; they wouldn’t believe me. But for years, I believed that the wizards had somehow stolen my father and put someone else in his place. And afterward, when I realized it couldn’t possibly be true—when I realized it was all charlatanry and faking—I hated them for that! God, how I hated them!”

  Bitterness scorched his voice. As if something had broken in him, and he could not stop, he continued to sob, thrusting Joanna’s comforting hand roughly away and huddling in his comer of the carriage, fighting alone for control over himself, as he had always fought alone. Antryg, perhaps understanding that the Prince would take comfort from a man that could not be taken from a woman, moved over beside the Regent and put his hands on those quivering black satin shoulders; though the touch seemed to calm the Prince, the tears would not stop flowing—a reservoir of them, damned for years.

  As for Antryg, his face was that of a man who has spoken a spell-word in jest and seen hell open before his eyes.

  “He changed,” the Prince whispered wretchedly. “How could I ever trust? There were other things to it....”

  “I’m sure there were,” Antryg murmured, as if he spoke to himself of some hideous vision that only he could see.

  “But that was the source of it. I’d loved my father, and they took that from me forever. In dreams...” With a final sob, the Regent sat up and made a clumsy effort to mop his face. “Curse it, there’s the Palace.”

  With some startlement, Joanna saw that they had almost reached the gilt-tipped gates of the Imperial Palace’s marble forecourt. His hands shaking, Pharos wiped with his black silk handerkerchief at his smeared cheeks. “I must look like some sniveling girl.”

  Antryg managed to grin, the enlightenment and the horror alike gone from his eyes, except for their shadow lurking somewhere far down in the water-gray depths. “I’m sure your father won’t care.”

  From the short flight of marble steps, guards in white and gold were descending to meet the carriage as the shadows of the Palace’s vast wings enfolded them. Rows of eastward-facing windows blazed with the reflected sun, and the gilded spines of the roofs sparkled like a frieze of fire.

  The bitter rictus of a smile pulled the Prince’s mouth, “No—not that he cares about anything. But...” The expression softened. Joanna saw that the Regent had spoken the truth; whatever hatred and fear he had borne his father through his adolescence and early manhood, the love of his childhood had been able to reassert itself since their roles had been reversed, since he had now become the stronger, and since his father was dependent upon him for care.

  “And if any of the servants comments,” Antryg added cheerily, as the footmen stepped forward in matched unison to let down the carriage step, “you can have him flogged.”

  The Prince shot him a devil’s grin as they descended. “Ah, you know how to gladden a man’s heart,” he retorted. Joanna followed them, wizard and prince, up the palace steps.

  From what he had said last night, Joanna had expected Antryg to make a careful investigation of the Emperor’s rooms; but either he had misled her or something had caused him to change his mind. The Emperor Hieraldus occupied a suite of rooms on the third floor of the north wing, reached by a small stairway from the State Rooms on the second. “One of my less creditable ancestors furnished them to house his mistress,” the Regent explained sotto voce as he opened a painted panel in the gilded oak wainscoting by the fireplace of what was referred to as the Emperor’s withdrawing room—a chamber the size of some barns Joanna had slept in during the course of the last two weeks. “He had the stair built—it’s overlooked by the guard outside the door there. Father and Grandfather both used the rooms as their private living quarters, since they’re more comfortable than the State Rooms.”

  Antryg looked around the huge withdrawing room, with its stately dark furniture and elaborate tapestries. “In the wintertime, I should imagine it would be difficult to find anything less comfortable. Your father always lived upstairs, then?”

  The Prince nodded. Since his breakdown in the carriage, much of his suave deadliness had deserted him; Joanna, though she knew he was perverted, mad, and cruel—though the bruises of his whip had not yet faded from Antryg’s face—found herself almost liking as well as pitying him. As she followed mage and Regent up the narrow stair, holding up the inevitable voluminous ecru petticoats, she shook her head at herself. First you fall in love with Antryg, she thought, and
now you like the Regent. I see you’re batting a thousand on this trip.

  “He is looked after constantly,” she heard Pharos say as he turned the gold knob of the door at the top of the flight. It was typical of the Palace, Joanna thought, that even the doorknob was a minor work of art, with gilded scrollwork and a tiny cloisonne painting of mythical gods disporting themselves among giggling nymphs. “None of his attendants have reported anything amiss.”

  “No,” Antryg said, almost absently. “No, they wouldn’t.”

  His examination of the rooms was almost cursory. Chamber after delicate chamber was crammed with all the beautiful things a man with unlimited wealth and good taste could accumulate, from delicate clocks to exquisite paintings, oppressive with the trapped, unventilated heat of early autumn, and pervaded with the sick, musty odor of a body that had ceased to look after itself.

  The Emperor himself, led out by a careful and cheery attendant, did not shock Joanna nearly so much as she had been afraid he would. He was only a man of about her father’s age, his scanty white hair clean and combed, his tidy clothes, apart from fresh food smears down his plain, dark waistcoat, speaking worlds of diligent and never-ending care on the part of his guardians. His mouth hung slightly open, and he stared straight ahead of him with blank eyes that barely tracked movement, but Joanna, who usually felt unease bordering on revulsion in the presence of the crippled or retarded, was a little surprised to find in herself nothing but an overwhelming sense of pity.

  “Were the rooms marked?” she asked as they descended the steps once more, with courtiers bowing to them when they passed through the State Rooms and headed once more toward the courtyard where the carriage waited.

  Antryg glanced at her, as if startled from a reverie of his own. “Oh, yes.”

  “Did it confirm your hunch?”

  He hesitated, and she sensed he was trying to decide whether to tell the truth or to formulate some other evasion, and suppressed a strong desire to shake him. At length he said, rather carefully, “No, it didn’t. I’d thought that the rooms would have been marked to—to do that to him by means of a spell. I don’t think that was the case.”