The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

Then he slumped sideways and was asleep.

  Chapter XIX

  IT WAS LONG AFTER dark when he awoke. Joanna was still sitting on the curiously comfortless gray chair beside the couch, her mind blank, her body and bones cold with exhaustion. She almost literally could not believe that she had awakened that morning in the old Summer Palace at Angelshand or that it was only fourteen or fifteen hours ago that she had sat in the Regent’s carriage, while he had wept as he’d spoken of his father. It was as if it had happened to someone else.

  And in a way, she thought, it had.

  The heat of the day had passed off. The party room was dim, illuminated only by the reflected yellow glare of the kitchen’s lights. Through the open glass doors of the patio, the smell of chlorine came in off the pool with the warmth of the tepid night.

  She saw Antryg stir, fighting his way to the surface of the dark well of his dreams, saw him try to move, and saw how his breath stopped, then quickened when he realized that he could not.

  His eyes opened, and he looked up into her face.

  “I’m sorry, Antryg.” Oddly enough, she meant it.

  He made a quick motion and ceased at once. His wrists and ankles were knotted tight with the plastic-wrapped wire Joanna had carried in her purse and which she’d gotten, weeks ago, from the telephone man at San Serano. With weary irony, she remembered thinking at the time that it would come in handy. More than that, Joanna realized, recalling her own first experience with barbiturates, he must be prey to the grandmother of all headaches. The eyes that stared up into hers were dark with despair and terror, but showed no surprise.

  “Caris is summoning the Council,” she said quietly. “Salteris had something called a lipa in his robes.”

  His head dropped back onto the cushions of the couch. She saw the shudder that went through him; but curiously, as he closed his eyes, what was in his face was a kind of relief.

  “Why?” she asked. “Who were you expecting?”

  The bruised eyelids moved a little, but did not open. He whispered, “Salteris.”

  Bitter heat went through her as she remembered how the old man had embraced him, just before he’d led Salteris into the shed. Her voice shook. “You know as well as I do that Salteris is dead.”

  His eyes opened again and looked up into hers. “You saw?”

  “I didn’t actually see you strangle him, no—but we saw enough.”

  The breath went out of him in a sigh. Two and two, Joanna thought numbly, once again and inevitably equal four. She went on, “But he told us.”

  His head turned so sharply that he flinched, and the color drained from his face. In the sidelong light that came from the kitchen, she could see the sweat gleam clammily on his cheeks and the bridge of that absurd nose. “Told you what?”

  “Who you are.”

  “Who I... ?” His eyes widened, as he understood. “No,” he said softly. “Joanna, no.”

  “He had no reason to lie.”

  “He had every reason! Joanna, don’t you understand? When Suraklin escaped for the last time from the body he was born in—the body that the Archmage and the Council slew and burned in Kymil twenty-five years ago—it was not my being, not my body, that he stole for his escape.”

  “Then why did he teach you everything he knew?”

  “I was his chosen victim, yes,” Antryg said quietly, and she could hear the desperation buried under the forced calm of his voice. “Although I didn’t know what was intended for me, I suspected—I don’t know what. It all became tangled with dreams and madness in the years I lived in hiding, knowing he was dead and feeling his mind seeking mine in my dreams. It’s why I had to find a member of the Council in Angelshand to confirm what I feared, though I already knew it to be true—to find where he’d been, who he’d been, all those years. For I knew he was alive. In nightmares, I’d see someone I knew looking at me with Suraklin’s eyes.... And then, in the Silent Tower, he came to me, and I knew him.”

  “Who?” Joanna demanded, closing her mind furiously against what she knew to be a trap.

  “Suraklin,” Antryg said softly. “Salteris.”

  “You expect me to believe that?” Panic made her hands tremble, and she closed them tightly on one another against the arm of the couch. “You expect me to trust your word, after you’ve lied and evaded me—”

  “I had to!” Antryg cried desperately. He twisted against his bonds, then shuddered and went white again, to lie still, teeth clenched, until the nausea passed. “He had an accomplice in this world, Joanna. I knew mat much from the marks on the walls here and at San Serano. None knows better than I the terrible strength of the hold he has on the minds of others. And I—I was afraid it was you.”

  She looked away from him, understanding suddenly why he had feared her; why he had feared even more the attraction that she knew he had felt toward her. Suraklin’s gift was to win the trust of others, she thought. No wonder Antryg would mistrust even his love for her—if he was telling the truth.

  “I wanted to trust you,” he went on. “I couldn’t. I didn’t dare. If he even suspected I’d guessed he was still alive, he would have hidden, gone underground in some other body, as he did before. I’m only a man, Joanna—one of the very few left who knew him, who might be able to recognize him. And in this vampire state, going from body to body, he is deathless. He had to be stopped....”

  “And you’re saying that’s why you killed Salteris.” She shifted her feet beneath her in the chair. Somewhere outside in the night, a warm stir of wind brought her the far-off sounds of the Ventura Freeway and the distant boom of a plane heading into Burbank. “Because Suraklin had taken over his body.”

  “No.” The crumpled, weary lines around his eyes darkened with something deeper than horror or grief. “I killed Salteris because Suraklin had departed from his body. Don’t you see? The body he first stole, the one in which he escaped from Kymil, was the Emperor’s. As Emperor, he ruled Ferryth for twenty-one years. Only Pharos guessed, and Pharos was a child and could do nothing—could not even dare believe what his heart told him was true, that his father had ceased to be his father. As the Emperor, he tried to have me executed after the Mellidane Revolts—and maybe it was he who pushed me into aiding the rebels in the first place. I don’t know. But four years ago, he left the Emperor, left him mindless as he is now, to take over Salteris’ mind and body, to become Salteris—and he left Salteris today, to go on to someone else. I killed Salteris...” He forced his voice steady, against the sudden stress of fatigue and grief. “I killed him because I had loved him, because he had been my master, and my friend. I could not bear to leave him as the Emperor is, a mindless, imbecile shell, cared for by others. And except for leaving Suraklin to begin with, it was the hardest thing I have ever done.”

  Like a litany, she whispered, “I don’t believe you. They told me...”

  “Suraklin told you,” Antryg insisted desperately. “He had to discredit and kill me. He left one of his gloves in my room, the first time he visited me, and by sleight of hand got Caris to believe he had them both with him. He never came into my rooms the second time, never entered the Tower at all. He couldn’t have touched the Void from within its walls; no one could, unless it was opened just outside. But he made Caris think he had by a spell of illusion, and if the Void had not weakened enough for me to escape then, Caris or the Bishop or the Witchfinders would have killed me that night, as he’d intended they should. He cannot afford to leave me alive. You must believe me, Joanna. Please believe me....”

  “Shut up!” She turned her face away, panic struggling to the surface of her heart. If you cannot prevent him from speaking to her, kill him, Salteris had said. Because she would hear the truth, she wondered, or because she would want to believe the lie?

  She heard the rustle of his body as he tried to move again; then it stilled. His voice, when he spoke, was rapid, as if he knew his time were running out.

  “He wanted to live forever. From a goal, it became an obsess
ion with him. He had the magic by which he dominated the minds of others; he used spells to break down his own mind, his personality, into thousands of small cells-subroutines, you call them—as if he visualized and formed by magic a duplicate of his personality, which he put into the mind and body of another. I had to learn who it was he’d taken to flee Kymil the first time after his defeat. Until this morning, I didn’t know who. And until this afternoon, when you said computers can reproduce the human brain, I didn’t know what his ultimate intentions were.”

  “A computer,” Joanna said quietly. She turned back and looked at the tall, gawky form in faded jeans and black-and-silver t-shirt, lying on the couch with his tawdry beads glinting in the reflected light. “Not program a computer to do magic—program a computer to be a mage. And use the teles to feed it electricity.”

  “At the cost of the life of your world and mine. At the cost of that dreadful pall of colorless grief, of unliving and uncaring, that will cover both our worlds when the computer is ready to run. And no one will understand quite what they are paying, or why. In a generation or two, they will not even remember what it was like before.”

  Something Salteris had said in this room caught at Joanna’s mind. Past the open patio doors, she could see the dark shed against the black of the evening sky where Caris sat alone with the lipa, the summoning-spell, and with the Archmage’s cold body. She felt a queer stirring along her nerves, the half-sensation of fear and cold, and knew that somewhere close the Void was being opened.

  “Just because you’re telling me this now,” she said softly, “doesn’t mean you’re not Suraklin.”

  The muscles of his bare arms moved again as he twisted against the wires. “Joanna, I swear it,” he said softly. “What can I say to make you believe me?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Because if you are Suraklin, you would say anything. Even...” She shut her mouth on the words, Even that you love me. After a moment she went on, “Salteris said Suraklin had the gift of making others trust him.”

  “I see he was right,” Antryg said bitterly.

  Joanna felt herself grow red. “He didn’t give me lies and half-truths and evasions.”

  “He told you a lie that was consistent from beginning to end,” the mage retorted. His breath was fast and uneven. Like her, he could sense the movement in the darkness outside. “Joanna, I followed Suraklin’s mark to this place, to the room where I first met you, upstairs here. Later, when I felt the Void opening again, I followed him back and found you in whatever hideout in the hills of Kymil he’d brought you to after his accomplice had kidnapped you from here. I didn’t know what he’d done with you before, if anything. For all I knew, you could be his slave as well. And then,” he said, “at Devilsgate...”

  She thrust aside the memory of the cobalt dimness of the drawing room, her overwhelming need for him, and the softness of that velvet voice in the gloom. “I don’t want to talk about Devilsgate,” she said stonily. “I was a fool....”

  “As was I,” he murmured. “I saw in the cards there that you would betray me. The sixteenth card, the Dead God—the sign they put on wizards to cripple their power when they lead them out to execution. In spite of that I wanted to trust you and found myself doing so, although I knew it was insane. I have always trusted too easily. I could not risk it.”

  “And I,” Joanna said quietly in the darkness, “I can’t risk this.”

  He lay silent then, the kitchen light shining on the sweat on his face and on the lenses of his specs. He stared at the ceiling. Gary, Joanna found herself thinking, would have been gazing accusingly at her; she pushed the comparison from her mind. The fact that Antryg had never shown her anything but caring, kindness, and, she suspected, love, the fact that he had risked his life to save her from the Regent and the Inquisition, and the fact that she loved him did not alter the fact mat he was Suraklin, the Dark Mage. Or—was he?

  It was not a case of two and two equaling four, but rather a hellish quadratic equation, in which there were two equally correct answers and no way to choose between them. Either everything Salteris had said was a lie or everything Antryg had said was. There must be some logical way to learn the truth, she thought, but she could not arrive at one. She wished desperately that she were better at understanding people or that she had more data.

  In the darkness outside, she was aware of movement, and dread chilled her like the onset of fever.

  “Joanna,” Antryg said quietly, and under the forced calm of his deep voice she heard the tremor of his panic. “I can’t prove any of this to you. I know I can’t. And it is unfair to ask anyone to make a choice based only on the heart. But you are in danger, too.” He shook aside the dampened ends of his hair, where they clung to his bony temples and the last bruised remnants of the Regent’s whip marks.

  “Suraklin left Salteris’ body. He can only have taken over someone else’s—at a guess, the accomplice in this world who’s been doing his programming for him. The accomplice would have met him at the shed—the shed’s marked with his sign as well, you know—when Suraklin guessed Salteris would be more good to him dead than alive, if I’d get the blame for his imbecility as well as the Emperor’s. But Suraklin wanted you for something. He stalked you in San Serano—he had his accomplice kidnap you from here and came here to get you, to bring you to that hideout of his, wherever it was. And it’s my guess he still wants you.”

  “Of course,” Joanna said, fighting the fear his words brought and her anger at the thought of how easily her fears were manipulated. “He might want me enough to save me from the Regent, or break me out of the Inquisition’s prison...”

  His eyes met hers in the darkness. “You know perfectly well why I saved you.”

  She turned away. Her voice shook again. “I don’t,” she said. “That’s the whole point. I don’t know.”

  In the hot, gluey darkness outside, the patio gate creaked. Antryg’s head came around quickly, and she saw the track of sweat along the high cheekbone. Low and very rapidly he said, “Let me go, Joanna. Please. When they’re gone, he’ll come back for you, whoever he is now....”

  “You’re trying to scare me into releasing you....”

  “I’m trying to save you, dammit!” He wrenched his arms furiously against the binding wires. In the patio, Joanna could see nothing in the dark, but thought she heard the slur of homespun robes against the stiff leaves in the planters and the pat of quiet feet on cement. Desperately, he said, “Joanna, they’ll kill me....”

  His eyes changed, looking past her to the doors. Joanna turned her head. Caris stood framed by the night, his face, for all its dust-covered exhaustion, set and queerly serene, but much older, a man’s face, not a youth’s. His naked sword blade flashed coldly in his hand. Behind him, nearly invisible in their dark robes against the darkness, she sensed others. From that shadowy assemblage, a woman stepped, tall and beautiful in her sable garments, the silver embroidery of the hyacinth stole she wore a pin-prick of reflected light beneath the loose curls of her dark hair.

  “Joanna,” she said softly. “I am Lady Rosamund Kentacre. In the name of the Council of Wizards, I thank you for what you have done.”

  Beside her, Joanna was aware of Antryg looking at the Council with the face of a man who knows that nothing he can say will save him.

  “Caris told us what happened,” the mage said, still in that low, sweet voice that, underneath its beauty, was colder than an assassin’s knife. “On behalf of the Council, I can only ask your pardon for the fact that you were drawn into the affairs of wizards. I promise you, for whatever it is worth, that this man will be punished, not only for what he has done to you, but for what he has tried to do to both our worlds.”

  Caris stepped forward, his dark eyes remote, stern, and curiously peaceful for all their weariness. He was once more a weapon of the Council; he had fulfilled his mission and encompassed his revenge. He had returned to being what he was, something Joanna knew already that she would never do. Three other
mages stepped forth from the darkness behind him—all young men, strong, and grim-looking. Two of them wore the blood-colored robes of the Church wizards, and Joanna guessed that peace had been made with me Bishop and the Witchfinders.

  Her stomach felt cold at the thought that it would be Peelbone who presided over Antryg’s questioning. With the Council and with Caris’ account of Salteris’ murder, the Regent would not protect him. She remembered me sudden iciness of those evil blue eyes and the shrill voice saying in me dimness of the attic, You will long for the death my father ordered for you...

  In a kind of daze, she stepped aside, and the mages untwisted the wire bonds from Antryg’s booted ankles and pulled him to his feet. He looked deathly white. He knew as well as Joanna did what waited for him on the other side of the Void. I want to be done with this, Joanna desperately thought, sick and wretched, knowing mat whatever the necessity for destroying Suraklin, this would always remain something she had done. I want this to be over...

  Lady Rosamund had turned back to me patio doors. Beyond them, Joanna could see forms moving, the stray glint of light on the pool, pale hands uplifting and with laborious concentration making the signs necessary to open one last time the gate in the darkness that separated world from world, time from time. Wind moved the gray draperies and lifted back the dark sleeves from Rosamund’s arms. It touched Joanna’s cheek and stirred in the graying mane of Antryg’s hair. Queer and cold, the smell of the Void filled the room with the terror of the haunted abyss. She thought, but wasn’t sure, she heard Antryg whisper despairingly, “No...”

  Beyond the doors lay nothing, an empty gulf of blackness, as if, beyond the frame of curtain and glass, all the universe fell away.

  Caris turned his head. For a moment his eyes met Joanna’s. Through the wall of his grief, which was already transmuting into a desperate perfectionism of his warrior’s vocation, she saw the last glimmer of his regret—regret at leaving her, perhaps his only non-sasennan friend, and at leaving the possibilities of the strange affairs of the world beyond the perfections of the killing arts. Joanna realized she would never see Caris again. When the Void closed up this final time, it would all be gone—the beauty of dawn on the marshes of Kymil, the twisting, cobbled streets of Angelshand, Magister Magus, and the poor, mad Regent