The Silicon Mage Read online

  Every time she had dreamed this, Joanna fought to leave the shadowy corner where she stood to go to his side. It was like trying to move, not under water, but smothered like a fly in the treacly amber of the firelight. Even her cries were stillborn in her aching throat. For a long minute, there was no sound in that dreadful room, save the cracking of the fire, and Antryg’s hoarse, sobbing breath.

  Then Caris asked quietly, “Why this?”

  The Bishop fixed upon him her clammy blue gaze.

  In a face still white from the mere closeness to the Sigil of Darkness, the young man’s brown eyes smoldered with hate. “He has confessed and been condemned by the Emperor, by the Witchfinders, and by the Council of Wizards. Why take the trouble of binding his powers, instead of killing him now? Has someone on the Council gotten jealous of the Council’s rights to judge its own?”

  “You are a sasennan of the Council, Caris, their living weapon.” The words came out as flat and cold as her fish-belly eyes. “It is not for the sword to question the hand that wields it.”

  Passion shook his low voice. “Salteris was my grandfather, damn you!”

  “Caris.” Ghostlike, the form of the wizard Lady Rosamund materialized in the darkness of the low doorway, the mage who had led in Antryg’s arrest. Behind the glitter of her bullion-stitched stole of office, she seemed little more than shadow within shadow, and those gathered behind her even less than that. “You put that away,” she reminded him, “when you took your vows as sasennan. From that moment, you had no grandfather. It is nothing to you which member of the Council has spoken for this man’s life, or why. Until that vote changes, he remains as he is.”

  Huddled in the shadows, Antryg had turned his face from the other wizards and covered it with his hands, as if by so doing he could hide from them. Twice Joanna had seen his fingers move toward the iron collar, but he could not bring himself to touch it. His whole body shivered. She thought he wept.

  The hearth fire had sunk to a bed of rubies on powdery ash. The smith and his apprentice had already departed. In the blood-colored glare, the Bishop gave that crumpled form one last scornful glance and followed, with her black-clothed guards about her; the wizards faded back into the shadows from whence they had come. For a time Caris alone remained, looking after them, his face like carved bone dyed by the sinking embers, motionless but for the somber glint of his eyes.

  Then he turned and walked to where Antryg lay.

  The wizard was silent. Only by the shaky draw and release of his breath could Joanna tell that he was alive at all or conscious. The rags of his robe had been pulled down off his shoulders; in the dull carmine light, she could make out the angles of scapula and vertebrae under taut, fine-textured white skin.

  Caris knelt beside him and drew his dagger. At the noise, Antryg raised his head, struggling up against some great weight of despair. Seizing him by the shoulder, the young man thrust him back against the stones of the wall. Coppery reflections of the fire glinted on the long blade, on the sweat that ran down Antryg’s face and chest, and on the evil jewels in the iron and lead of the collar.

  For a time Antryg looked, not at the blade that hung inches from his naked throat, but at the sasennan’s eyes. Then very slowly he brought up his hands, and Joanna saw that his fingers were all splinted and bandaged, swollen as if every joint had been dislocated. Gritting his teeth slightly against the pain, with the edge of one wrist he pushed back the sleeve of his robe to expose ropy muscle and veins tracked to the elbows with whitened scars.

  “Please,” he said softly. “I’d take it as a great favor.”

  In one savage move Caris hurled him aside and jerked upright to stand over him. For that instant, no matter how many times Joanna had dreamed this scene, she thought that he would kick Antryg with fury and frustration and hate. But he turned on one booted heel and snapped the dagger back into its sheathe. The firelight blinked on its hilt as he strode into the darkness of the doorway, leaving Antryg lying alone, like a broken scarecrow in the gathering dark.

  After a long time, the wizard crawled to his feet. Holding himself upright against the walls with his bandaged hands, he stumbled toward the door and beyond its darkness to the stair that led to his prison in the Silent Tower above.

  The bus lurched to a stop at the gates of San Serano, and Joanna got out. The shuddering heat of the day radiated through the soles of her battered hightop sneakers from the asphalt as she crossed the parking lot to Building Six; the empty hills that surrounded the plant loomed like brownish cardboard cutouts in the smog.

  You mustn’t think about Antryg, she told herself wearily. Not of the lightness of those big hands as he’d taught her to drive Prince Cerdic’s carriage nor those evenings they’d spent at the posthouses along the road from Kymil to Angelshand, drinking ale and talking. Not the tones of that remarkable voice, deep and beautiful like some lunatic Shakespearean actor’s nor the desperate heat of his lips against hers. That was one thing nobody ever mentioned, she thought wryly—that the obverse side of learning to care for someone was that you couldn’t stop caring when it hurt.

  The straps of the heavy backpack cut into her shoulder. It contained a variety of things, mostly bought out of money pilfered by computer from Gary’s various illegal bank accounts—bank accounts he had filled by computer theft from financial institutions across the United States. She’d found everything about them—account numbers, amounts, even the break-in program he’d modemed into all those banking computers after hours—in the programs of his personality in the DARKMAGE files. It hadn’t taken much tinkering to help herself. Gary and Suraklin between them—between him? she couldn’t help wondering—had done a good deal of evil. She considered it only right that they should finance her expedition to free Antryg—And he is alive! she insisted desperately to herself. He is!—and defeat Suraklin’s plan.

  She couldn’t go on fighting him alone.

  So she’d bought cultured pearls and synthetic sapphires and rubies, beef jerky and Granola bars, a lightweight water bottle and a six-inch sheath knife to go with the Swiss Army knife she already had, duct tape, nylon cord, a bundle of plastic-coated copper wire, carbide hacksaw blades, and various other supplies. From a pair of costumers she knew who catered to the Renaissance Faire crowd, she’d ordered a gown made to the best of her recollections that would pack small, but, once unpacked, would allow her to pass inconspicuously in a society that frowned upon women wearing trousers. The thought of passing herself off as a boy, as so many romantic heroines seemed able to do, had crossed her mind, but one glance in the mirror put the kibosh on that one.

  She’d bought a .38 Colt Diamondback and a cleaning kit and had practiced until the blasting roar and the kick no longer twitched at her aim. She had toyed with the notion of going to one of the jock hackers she knew for some kind of portable induction coil simply to degauss the stolen computer’s circuits, but from what she had read of its specs she knew its shielding was up to anything a battery was likely to generate, and there was no guarantee she’d be able to tap into the computer’s magical electrical source herself. The idea of high explosive she’d simply discarded; aside from the legal restrictions entailed in acquiring it, she knew herself to be far too inexperienced to use or transport it with anything resembling safety.

  But input is input. If Gary—Suraklin—could transfer programs from the San Serano mainframe to his new computer, so could she. So in a special pocket of her backpack, reinforced with metal and wrapped in layer after layer of plastic, was her best and most illegal wipe-the-disk worm program.

  For the rest, her backpack was jammed with hardcopy. Some of it photoreduced and Xeroxed almost to illegibility, some merely shoved in at random as it came off the modem-lines that she hadn’t even had time to look at. She’d been hacking into the DARKMAGE files for a month, but owing to the sheer volume of them, there had been so little time. So little time, she thought—but more than enough for Antryg to be...

  Stop that! she ordered herse
lf. Antryg is alive. He has to be. He has to...

  And if he wasn’t, she knew, with cold and sinking dread, she’d have to stop Suraklin herself.

  They’d already shut down most of the lights in Building Six. Very quietly, Joanna moved down the blue-carpeted corridors of the empty typing pools, between programmers’ deserted cubicles. She had stolen back into San Serano this way at least twice a week for the last month and it always brought up in her a variety of emotions, but paramount, horrifying, in her mind was the knowledge that Suraklin still needed her. He had kidnapped her once before when he was planning to take over Gary’s body, and knew he’d need a programmer in his universe under his influence to take Gary’s place. Rather, he had gotten Gary to kidnap her and had himself taken her across the Void. Had Antryg not been following him, she would even now be the Dark Mage’s helpless puppet and slave.

  Almost the last thing Antryg had said to her when they’d finally taken him was to warn her. And of course she hadn’t listened.

  Nearly ill with the violence of her hammering heart, she walked swiftly along those darkened halls. If he met her now, he’d have her, and every step she took closer to the Main Computer Room made her danger worse.

  Relax, she commanded shakily. You’ve done this a dozen times.

  She was still shaking all over by the time she slipped into one of the programming cubicles across the hall from the mainframe.

  You’ve done this a dozen times...

  Left work with everyone else to stash your car in a parking lot en route, but never the same parking lot, and sneaked back here by bus to take a roundabout way back into the plant to wait ...Spent your time raiding computer files and toting around twenty pounds of backpack...

  Altogether, she thought wryly, to quiet the shakiness in her chest, this had damn well better not be a hallucination after all.

  She felt a little like a white-robed cultist who, having sold everything he owns, stands expectantly on his mountaintop, awaiting the end of the world. And I’m going to feel just as silly, she added, trudging down home again...

  Feet swished softly on the carpet outside. Joanna flattened her body against the wall behind the cubicle’s half-open door and angled her head sideways to look through its crack. For one flashing instant she identified Gary as he passed.

  The Gary who was no longer Gary now, in the absence of anyone who had known Gary, didn’t bother to keep up the pretense. In spite of years of conscientious weight-lifting, Gary—of medium height and slender build, despite a recent tendency toward paunchiness—had never looked particularly comfortable with his body. He walked now with an animal grace subtly at odds with the sensible gray polyester trousers and the pale quiana shirt.

  Joanna saw he was carrying a briefcase, and her heart turned perfectly cold within her.

  It was, after all, going to be tonight.

  She’d guessed it when she’d tapped into the DARKMAGE files early this morning and found large sections of them gone. No modem-lines stretched across the Void. He was doing his programming on the San Serano mainframe, but he had to transfer his files across the Void by hand.

  She felt the terrified urge to cry. Don’t think about it, she told herself severely and tiptoed soundlessly across the darkened cubicle to the phone. To her infinite relief, she got Ruth’s answering machine. It had been a good bet she would—Ruth was rarely home—but the last thing she wanted right now was questions.

  She said, simply, “Ruth, this is Joanna. Use your key to my place. There’s a manila envelope on the table, with some instructions. Please carry them out. I’ll explain when I see you, but that might not be for a few weeks. I’m not in any trouble. ‘Bye.”

  Paranoid, schizo, obsessive, insane.

  Why does it have to be me?

  Antryg, she thought, must have felt the same.

  Then something changed in the air. It was a sensation she would have been totally unable to describe—an unreasoning terror, a strange tingling of the nerves, a sense of standing on a beach whose shoreline is not water but the black drop-off into eternity. But once felt, it could not be mistaken for anything else. Dark winds seemed to whisper across her bones; she felt she could hear the murmuring echoes of unknown forces, moving in blackness.

  The Void between the universes was being bridged. Suraklin was going across.

  She was keyed to the shaking point as she slid out the cubicle door. I can’t let Suraklin see me, she thought desperately. As of now I’ve disappeared and left a plausible story for why I won’t be seen for a couple of weeks. No one will look for me.

  But of course, if Suraklin took her now, it wouldn’t matter if the search started tomorrow. No one would find her until she returned, her mind not her own.

  Cold white light poured through the computer room door into the darkened corridor. The backpack with the purse strapped to it now dragged her shoulders, but she scarcely noticed. She thought, quite reasonably, There’s a nine o’clock bus back to Encino... and put her head around the door.

  And the good news is, she thought half-hysterically, it wasn’t all a hallucination.

  That is, unless I’m having a hallucination now.

  There was darkness in the computer room.

  Darkness hideously surrounded by the fluorescent blaze of the lights, like a cloud of gas but definitely not a vapor, not a substance at all. A darkness that seemed to stretch away, never reaching the rear wall with its banks of green-eyed monitor lights, but seeming to extend far past it, a ghostly corridor that stretched to the abysses of infinity. Far off, along that great gulf of nothing, she sensed movement.

  There was no one now in the computer room. At its edges, the darkness was already beginning to disperse.

  And the bad news is...

  ...It wasn’t all a hallucination.

  And you’re going to have to walk into it.

  A small voice within her suggested timidly, Can’t I just go home and forget the whole thing?

  Not allowing herself to think any further about that very real option, Joanna strode forward into that darkness.

  Chapter II

  IT WAS BEYOND A DOUBT the most frightening thing she had ever done. She hadn’t gone two steps when she wanted to turn around and go back, but she knew already she dare not even look over her shoulder to see if it were possible. Far in the lightless Void ahead of her Gary’s—Suraklin’s—yellow polyester shirt was a flitting blur. If she lost sight of that, she would be lost indeed.

  Vertigo swamped her, the sensation of falling, the terror of feeling nothing beneath her feet. She struggled forward, half-running, half-swimming, tractionless and desperate to keep that pale will-o’-the-wisp in sight, smothering in darkness such as she had never known. Tears burned her eyes, tears of terror and resentment. When she had gone through to that other world the first time she had been unconscious; coming back, Salteris’—Suraklin’s—thin, strong hand had been her guide.

  Don’t think, she told herself. Caris could follow a man through the Void unguided; you can, too. Cold that was not really cold was leeching the strength from her veins. She ran/swam/flew through the darkness, fighting frantically not to lose sight of the man who would destroy her if he found her now.

  The darkness was alive. She knew it, felt it, sensed the vast amorphous things that floated in that frozen emptiness; she heard the dry, glittery whisper of something close behind. Panting, wheezing breath, she wondered, or her own desperate gasping as she struggled to keep Suraklin in sight? Her sweat, dripping from her hair in icy droplets, cold on the bare flesh of her arms, or...?

  She ran harder, sobbing, not daring to look behind her. Only the fact that she could not stop to get her breath prevented her from screaming Suraklin’s name, pleading with him to come back and fetch her. If he needed her services as Antryg had said, he couldn’t let her be lost in the Void.

  He was gone.

  Darkness was around her, wind—or something else—clawing the ends of her flying hair. There was no blur ahead of h
er, only plunging darkness, livid with the sense of writhing things. Far off to her right, something bright caught her eye, fragile, milky light, and she sensed the smell of rain. Though it was nowhere near the direction she had last seen Suraklin, she veered toward it, running as she had never run before, running in heartbursting panic, with the pack dragging her shoulders, like the weighted flight of nightmare. Something swooped at her, some winged and flabby thing whirling out of the aphotic pits of this nonbeing; she felt it cut her arm, felt blood hot on the cold flesh. She didn’t look, only ran harder. Time had stopped; she felt as if she had been running for hours, aimless and in terror. What if she had been? she wondered frantically. What if the light before her vanished as Suraklin had? What if it was only a lure? What if she never got out, if this would go on until she died? What if she didn’t die? Her hair tangled in her eyes, the pack was dragging on her, pulling her back, and the light was drifting away, fainter and fainter...

  Then it was clear before her, a white moon burning full and clear in a wide-flung double ring of ice mists above a broken line of standing-stones. Sodden grasses whipped Joanna’s calves as she ran; cold sliced her arms, damp and raw. Behind her she heard the chitter and hiss that had filled her ears in the Void. Risking a glance over her shoulder, she saw it, as much of it as there was to see—something dark and floating, a chitinous tangle of long, knobby legs, with moonlight edging an aureole of floating tendrils like a woman’s long hair in water. The tendrils reached out toward her, and, in the knot of darkness at the creature’s center, things like specks of faceted glass caught the moonlight.