The Silicon Mage Read online

  Antryg nodded, his old demented grin flickering through the lines of strain on his face. “Certainly superior to beavers, who are said to tear off certain of their bodily parts and throw them at pursuers to discourage the chase, though why it should do so has always escaped me. They’re convinced I’ve gone through the outfall and are going to spend the rest of the night and all day tomorrow tearing apart the town. I hope whatever refuge you had planned for us wasn’t in Kymil?” He was shivering violently with exhaustion, nerves, and cold. They were all soaked to the skin and the night was cruel.

  She shook her head, “Larkmoor Manor.” His brows dove together as he identified its name, then quirked upward, taking with them a whole ladder of forehead wrinkles. It was the first time she’d ever seen him put off-balance by anything she’d said. “We’re guests of Pellicida of Senterwing.”

  “Good Heavens,” he murmured, startled and bemused.

  “The horses are at the end of the causeway...”

  “Just a moment, my dear.” And turning, he pushed aside the concealing boards. To Caris’ utter horror, he dashed back across the open water to the outfall again.

  As he came splashing back, Caris snapped, “You’re not only mad, you’re a fool! Every sasennan in town must be near the gates...”

  “Nonsense.” Antryg scraped the mud gingerly from the thing he held in his hand. “The Bishop had this made specially for me and it would be churlish to throw it away. Put this in your backpack, would you, my dear? We’ll wrap it in lead when we get to safety...” He handed it to Joanna. It was the iron collar bearing the Sigil of Darkness.

  They made their way back to the horses without further mishap, Antryg cheerfully directing the one group of sasenna they met on the causeway toward the town. Wet, cold, aching and exhausted almost to numbness, she scrambled up onto her horse behind Antryg, put her arms around his waist, and leaned her cheek against his bony back. She felt she could have gone to sleep that way and slept for days as the horses jogged into the windy darkness toward Larkmoor and what she knew would be only a relative and temporary safety.

  One more subroutine successfully completed, she thought tiredly. They had rescued Antryg—or Antryg had rescued himself—alive, whole, and sane, or at least as sane as Antryg had ever been.

  Now their troubles would really begin.

  Chapter VIII

  “SO WHAT WAS IT that finally convinced you that I was telling the truth?”

  Extravagantly gowned in a robe of plum-colored velvet that had originally been made for the Emperor Hieraldus, Antryg sat at one side of a small table laid for high tea, in the course of which he had made his appearance, interrupting his fellow conspirators. Though it was early yet in the afternoon, the drawing room lamps at Larkmoor Manor had been lit on sideboards of carved maple, the glow of them pale against the uncertain grayness of the stormy daylight outside. Now and then wind would sigh along the northern wall of the house, and Joanna, if she stood too near that wall, found it cold to her touch.

  With the blackish dye washed out of it, Antryg’s hair was far grayer than Joanna remembered, and with the loss of flesh the trace work of lines around his eyes and running back into his hair had deepened to gullies. In the daylight, he looked thinner and badly the worse for wear. The fur collar of the robe framed a three-inch band of sores and raw flesh around his neck above the too-prominent points of his collarbone; the big bones of his wrists, similarly wealed, stood out from the wasted flesh. Even so, his hands, cradling the creamy smoothness of an eggshell teacup, had all their old lightness, and behind the cracked spectacles, his gray eyes were daft as ever, but at peace.

  “We’ve seen Suraklin,” Joanna said quietly. “You were right. He needed an accomplice from my world, a programmer. No wonder you thought it was me. But he took over Gary, my—my boyfriend.”

  “Ah,” Antryg said softly. “The one who got computers to do his stealing for him.”

  She nodded a little wearily, recalling the details of Gary’s dealings with Suraklin, meticulously cataloged in the DARKMAGE files from the viewpoints of both seducer and seduced. Gary had never stood a chance.

  For a moment she sat staring into her teacup, tracing the curves of its gilded handle with one fingertip. Then she took a deep breath, set it down, and plunged into a dispassionate account of her own belated conclusions and adventures, with Pella filling in, awkwardly but without omissions, her own experiences and suspicions of Cerdic’s new Spiritual Advisor, the night at the gambling rooms, and the storm.

  “The damn thing is that there’s no proof,” Joanna concluded. “It’s only little things, nothing that can be pointed to. But these—these spells of deadness—are still taking place, though most people don’t believe they’re objective and not subjective. I’m starting to find that a little hard to believe.”

  “Are you?” Antryg said mildly. “Most people are firmly convinced there is a difference between objective and subjective reality and would find it extremely hard to believe otherwise. You’re rather like someone looking down at a maze from the top, instead of wandering through it. There’s really quite a nice maze at the Citadel of Wizards in the north, by the way. And since there’s no proof of when any particular abomination appeared in this world, I suppose they’re all credited to me whilst I was roving about loose at the end of the summer. I expect that, now I’ve escaped, the attempts on Pharos’ life will start up again.”

  He set down his teacup and rubbed his fingers as if for warmth or to massage away some chronic ache. “I suppose there have been none since my capture? I didn’t think so. Verisimilitude has always been Suraklin’s strong point.”

  He glanced across the table at Caris, dressed in snuff-colored servant’s livery and silently buttering and rebuttering a muffin which he clearly had no intention of eating. “I’m sorry, Caris,” Antryg said softly.

  The young man raised eyes like those of an injured wolf, ready to savage the hands extended to help him.

  Antryg went on, “Suraklin destroyed a man we both loved very much—raped him of body and mind, used them for his own purposes, and threw him away when he was done. But the fact remains that I was the one who killed what was left.”

  Caris shook his head. Muffled and unwontedly low, he said, “If I’d found him the way the Emperor now is, I’d have done the same.”

  “I suppose Suraklin was counting on that—the fact that I couldn’t stay long in that world and would never leave him there like that, helpless among strangers. But of course, whether I killed him or let him live, either way I’d have been blamed for it. Pella...” He looked across at the big girl, who sat quietly stroking Kyssha’s head which lay on her velvet lap. “You were as much wronged by him as any of us, and it’s worse, I suppose, since you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and married to the wrong person. Thank you for being good enough to help us. Caris, Joanna...” He turned simply to face them. “I do owe you my life. I wish I had a better way of thanking you than immediately hauling you both into greater danger with me, but I haven’t. I’m sorry about Gary also,” he added, turning to Joanna, who sat on the tapestried hassock at his side. “From the little I saw of him, he was never much of a man, but I suppose he was the best man he could be under the circumstances that made his life.”

  Joanna sighed, feeling as if she were seeing Gary clearly for the first time. “Not even that, I’m afraid.” She reached out and laid her hand over his.

  The night had been sleety and cold. In the late autumn dawnlight, Joanna had slipped out of the room Pella had given her, stealing down the silent corridor to the one where Antryg slept. A fire burned low in the grate there, its wickering the only sound but for the moan of the wind around the eaves and brief staccato of rain. Antryg had been in bed under a gray satin comforter, his hair close-curled still with the dampness of washing, profoundly asleep.

  It was all Joanna had meant to do—to see him, to reaffirm to herself the fact that against all the odds in the world he was still al
ive. It had been her litany and her hope for two dreadful, endless months that she hadn’t done the irrevocable and that somehow, somewhere, they would meet again.

  Tomorrow or the day after, they would have to face Suraklin, break into whatever depths beneath his ancient Citadel housed his stolen computer, destroy him, or, as Caris said—as Joanna uneasily feared—die trying. Her thoughts flinched away from what would happen to her if she survived her own defeat as his prisoner.

  But there in that still bedchamber of amber and gray, all of it seemed impossibly distant and very unreal. Yesterday she had been jolting miserably in Pella’s phaeton, aching with fear and sleeplessness, feeling that the journey would never end. Tomorrow might see her, Caris, and Antryg dead, all hope and magic perished forever. Today, this morning, went no further than Antryg’s preposterous profile against the bed linen, the whisper of his breathing and the spattering of wind and rain.

  She had still been standing there, leaning one shoulder against the carved cherrywood bedpost, when his eyes had opened.

  He had been sleeping again when she left. In fact, he had slept most of the day, and Joanna had the impression, looking now at the harsh lines around his eyes as he bent to refill his teacup from the ostentatiously garlanded pot, that he could have slept for the next twenty-four hours without trouble. He looked very tired.

  Pella said gravely, “You know, they’re going to put the blame for all of it on you now—the storm, the abominations, and the failure of the harvest.” She held a fragment of buttered muffin out to Kyssha, and the little dog accepted it with as much condescension as if she hadn’t been watching every bite with tears of bogus starvation in her eyes. “If you could work enough magic in the Tower to escape, they’ll figure you could work enough to do all that.”

  Antryg sighed. “I know. But, of course, I didn’t escape by magic. I couldn’t use magic—not in the Tower, not with the Sigil welded against my flesh.”

  “Then how did you get out of the chains?”

  He shrugged. “Picked the locks. Three or four years ago, the Bishop went through some kind of scare and threatened to have me chained; the rings had been in the wall there for hundreds of years. As a precaution, I took apart some of the toys I used to spend my time making and fashioned about a dozen picklocks from the wires in them. I hid them in the cracks of the floor and the walls all around the rings, and down in other areas of the Tower when I could get to them. And since I couldn’t pass the Sigil on the door, I pretty much had the freedom of the Tower in those days.

  “I picked the locks of my chains fairly regularly, to pilfer things from the guardroom downstairs—the uniform coat and breeches, a razor to cut off my hair and beard, and an outer coat to hide the fact that I wasn’t wearing any weapons. I used a razor to whittle a stick to make the right sword-line under my coat—if I’d actually stolen a sword, it would have been missed, and they’d have searched the place. I’d stuff everything up under the rafters when I wasn’t working on it. With no windows the place was pretty dark, but of course I can see in the dark and none of the guards, not being mageborn, could.”

  “I’d been doing this for over a month—as soon as I got my hands working again, in fact. For weeks all I did was crouch in a corner, mumbling to myself while I grew my beard and worked at my fingers. The Inquisitors had dislocated most of them, but only four were actually broken. I think they’ll always be a bit crooked now. I had to wrap them up twisted again so the guards would think I was still crippled and not watch me too closely.”

  Caris glanced up cynically from some private contemplation. “And you played mad for the same reason?”

  “For a number of reasons,” Antryg admitted, his long fingers moving unconsciously over the dark fur of the velvet robe’s cuffs. “The important thing was to keep any of the guards from knowing how I really look. For one thing, I’m nearly six foot three. No matter how I was disguised, I wouldn’t have got ten yards if anyone in the Tower had ever seen me when I wasn’t hunched over and sitting down. It’s why I had the visions of obscure saints.”

  “What?” Pella demanded, half-laughing. Joanna had forgotten to mention to her that conversations with Antryg were apt to contain several wildly disparate topics per sentence.

  He regarded her with his mild, mad eyes, as if surprised she didn’t see the connection. “Most Church sasenna are halfway to being monks. After two years in a monastery, I could describe saints that only other novices would recognize. Did you know Saint Kalwiddoes was supposed to have a metal nose? He allegedly lost the original for his faith; one calls upon him to cure sinus problems. Eventually I won enough sympathy among some of the Church guards to prod the Bishop into changing the lot every few weeks.”

  Caris sniffed disgustedly. “It was all a blind, then.”

  Antryg was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Not really.” Outside the window, the bare trees that surrounded Larkmoor thrashed uneasily in the wind, their black branches clawing like witch fingers at the mottled sky. “There were times when it all came home to me—where I was, and what was happening outside... Moments of sanity, I suppose, when I realized the truth of my position and my prospects. But one can’t pound on the walls and scream all the time.

  “And I was so tired. The Sigil of Darkness not only eats a wizard’s magic, it devours him through it. The thing was literally killing me by inches. I could barely eat; I couldn’t sleep, and when I did finally pass out from sheer exhaustion, the dreams made me wish I hadn’t.” He sat silent again, his head bowed, the white light from the windows glancing across the round lenses of his spectacles like circles of cracked and dirty ice. He had, Joanna noticed, acquired a pair of earrings as well as the Emperor’s robe, solitaire diamonds of well over two carats apiece which flickered when he looked up again. “I had to get that thing off me,” he said simply. “I had to break out. Even if no warrant of execution was ever issued, it was only a matter of time before I became too weak to do so.”

  “But the question is,” Caris said suspiciously, “how did you break out? You say no wizard can pass the Seal of the Dead God. But it was on the door of the Tower as well. Even if you’d managed to disguise yourself as a guard, shave off your beard, cut your hair, and dye it, too—What did you use for dye, by the way?”

  “Lampblack and dye soaked from the cover of a stolen book of scriptures. I’m told in Trembergil there’s a root that will turn gray hair black permanently, if it’s eaten, and Queen Darthirambis II once paid four elephants, ten lengths of second-quality silk, and two dancing boys for enough to cover the palm of her hand. The guards were forever stealing things from each other, the Church sasenna from the Council’s and vice versa. No one noticed my thefts.”

  “But even if you managed to do all that,” Caris said doggedly, “and went down among them with impunity, how did you walk through the door of the Tower?”

  Antryg said nothing for a time, absentmindedly rubbing his fingers again. Joanna, glancing sideways at the round, brownish mark that seemed to have been burned into the galled skin of his throat, said softly, “Desensitization, wasn’t it? They do that in my world as a cure for phobias.”

  A half smile flicked at the extravagant curve of his lips. “It was the one thing I was afraid of—that when it came down to the moment, I wouldn’t be able to do it. And I almost couldn’t. One never becomes desensitized—not to the Sigil of Darkness. Its hold never slacks. But I’d had it on me, welded against my flesh, for over two months. If I hadn’t gone through that—if I didn’t know that the alternative of walking past the Sigil on the door was enduring God knows how much longer of it before I finally died—I couldn’t have done it. It took me about five minutes of standing there to work up my nerve as it was. But fortunately, I’d already roused the Tower with the news of my own disappearance, and the place was in such chaos that no one noticed.”

  He glanced over at Caris, half-apologetically, as if he sensed in the young man’s folded arms and crossed knees his furious disapproval. The sasenn
an had come prepared to perform an heroic rescue and, like Joanna, still illogically felt slightly cheated. “Once I got through the door, I joined in the search while they ransacked the Tower and its grounds. I’d shoved my old robes and my cut-off hair and beard up into my hidey-hole under the rafters so the idea of disguise wouldn’t occur to anyone. They thought they were looking for a barefoot and ragged cripple. Without my spectacles, I could see just well enough not to run into walls. Of course no sasennan wears spectacles. I’m told there have been those who’ve killed themselves as flawed when their eyes began to harden at fifty. Eventually I joined the parties going out to search the hills. Since they’d been changed so often, not only did no guard there remember what I’d looked like when I was brought in, before I grew my beard back, but they weren’t able to identify each other by sight, either. After that...” He shrugged. “All that remained was to lose the other guards, put on my spectacles, slip into Kymil through the sewers, and pilfer a hacksaw. I had to wait until night, because in Kymil there are plenty of people who would recognize me—aside from the Church dogs, that is. But it’s always easy to hide in a city.”

  He subsided back into his chair, the embroidered velvet settling around him like a royal mantle. Cradling his teacup once more in his big, deft hands, he stared into its henna depths as if he could read his own future there, as he had that of countless travelers on the Angelshand road to buy dinner for himself and his companions. And perhaps, thought Joanna worriedly, he could. At any rate, a small upright line twitched into existence between his brows, and he set the cup quickly aside.

  She wondered what he’d seen there.

  In time Caris broke the silence. “You know that was your last chance.”

  “Oh, yes.” His deep voice was almost absentminded as his gray eyes flicked back to the young man’s face. “By this time, there will be a mad-dog warrant out for me. If they find me now, they’ll kill me out of hand. So this is quite literally our last chance to stop Suraklin—not merely to destroy his computer, which I’m positive is hidden beneath the ruins of his old Citadel at the node of the energy-lines, but to finish him.” His lips pulled slightly in a smile again, but for one moment his eyes were quite sane—gazing, as he had said, when he spoke of his fits of screaming despair in the Tower, quite truthfully at his position and his prospects. Then he let it go, and the old, luminous madness of hope returned. “This time we’ll just have to succeed.”