The Silent Tower Read online

  It occurred to him suddenly to wonder, as he watched Salteris usher the physician over to his waiting gig, what Thirle had been doing abroad at that hour of the night at all? For that matter, what had Rosamund been doing up; she had been fully dressed, her hair not even crumpled from the pillow, so she must have been so for some time. He glanced back into the room behind him. Aunt Min, too, was dressed, though her thin, straggly white hair was mussed—but of course, reflected Caris, with rueful affection for the old lady, it always was.

  Had they all, like himself, been restless with the damp warmth of the night?

  Tepid dawn air stirred in his close-cropped, fair hair and stung the tender cuts on his cheek, where the assassin’s bullet had driven brick-chips into his face. The day was beginning to blush color into the houses opposite, the black half-timbering of their shabby fronts taking on their daytime variation of browns and grays. The jungly riot of Thirle’s pot plants was wakening to green in daylight their owner would never see.

  Down in the Yard, Skipfrag was climbing into his gig, adjusting his voluminous coat skirts and gathering the reins of the smart bay hack that stood between the shafts. Salteris stood beside the horse’s quarters, talking quietly to him. The physician’s voice came clearly to Caris where he stood on the steps. “It’s best I was gone. My reputation as a physician might carry off experiments with electricity, but it would never recover, if word got around I believed in magic. I’ll learn for you what I can—do what I can, at Court. Until then, watch yourself, my friend.”

  Salteris stepped back as Skipfrag turned the gig. The iron wheels clattered sharply on the stones. Then the Emperor’s physician was gone.

  The Archmage stood still for some time after Skipfrag was gone. The brick steps were cool under Caris’ bare feet, and the dawn air stirred his torn and muddied shirt. He looked down at his grandfather in the paling light of the Yard and noted again how the old man had aged in the eighteen months since Caris had taken his vows and come to live at the Mages’ Yard. When he had last seen the Archmage before that time—before he had gone into training in the Way of the Sasenna—the old man had had a kind of wiry strength for all his age. Now he seemed like antique ivory worn to the snapping-point. With a sigh, the old man turned back, stopped, and looked up when he saw Caris on the steps.

  “What did Aunt Min mean?” Caris asked softly. “About other worlds? About the Void and the Gate in the Void?” He came down the steps and offered the old man his steadying hand. “Are there worlds, besides this?”

  This time Salteris took the hand. The cold, thin fingers felt delicate as bird bone. Not a big man, Caris was conscious as he had never been before that he stood slightly taller than the Archmage, this gentle old grandfather who had once lifted him up in childhood. Though it was not his way to think much about the passage of time, he felt its fleeting shadow brush his thoughts. He was silent as he helped the old man to the top of the steps.

  As they stood there together, the Archmage was quiet, too, considering, as he often seemed to do, what he could say to one who did not have the training in magic ever to understand fully.

  Then he nodded. “Yes,” he said quietly. “And I very much fear that what you saw, my son, was a Gate such as Aunt Min described—a Gate through the Void that separates world from world.”

  Caris stammered, “I—I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  A faint smile flicked those thin lips. “Few have,” the Archmage said softly. “And fewer still have crossed that Void, as I have—once—and walked in a world on its other side.” For a moment, the dark eyes seemed to gaze beyond him, as if they saw past the stones of the Yard, past the dawn sky, past the cosmos itself. “As far as I know, only two men in this world have ever had an understanding of what the Void itself is, how it works, and how to touch and feel it, to see across it to its other side. One of them is dead...” He hesitated, then sighed again. “The other one is Antryg Windrose.”

  “Antryg?” Caris murmured. “Thirle said that name...”

  Salteris glanced at him quickly, and the long white eyebrows quirked up. “Did he?” A moment’s doubt crossed the dark eyes, then he smiled. “He would have, if he thought—as I do—that some danger might be coming to us from across the Void. Antryg,” he repeated, and Caris felt a stirring in his memory, like an old story overheard in childhood.

  “Antryg,” Lady Rosamund’s derisive voice echoed behind them.

  Caris turned. Darkly beautiful, she stood in the doorway of the house behind them, her slender white hands folded around the buckle of her belt, her dark curls lying thick on her shoulders like a careless glory of raven flowers.

  Memory seemed to filter back to him of things spoken across him, without his understanding, by the mages. “He was a wizard, wasn’t he?”

  “Is,” the Archmage said. He shifted his dark robes up on his thin shoulders, and his eyes, again, seemed to look out across time.

  “A dog wizard.” Lady Rosamund’s voice could have laid frost-flowers on glass. “Forsworn of his vows and no more than the dog wizards who peer into treacle and asses’ dung for the secrets of gold and immortality at the bidding of any who’ll pay.”

  “Maybe,” Salteris said softly. “Except that he is, beyond a doubt, the most powerful mage now living. Thirteen years ago, he was the youngest member ever elected to the Council of Wizards—three years later he was expelled from the Council, stripped of his rank, and banished for meddling in the quarrel between the Lords of the Wheatlands and the Emperor. Since that time, he has been reinstated and banished again, and I and the other mages have had occasion to hunt him half across the face of the world.”

  Caris frowned. Half-recalled childhood memories ghosted into his mind, framed in amber hearthlight—the Archmage sitting beside the brick chimney oven of Caris’ grandmother’s house, and beside him the tall, thin young man he’d brought with him, gravely constructing a pin-wheel by the light of the kitchen fire, or telling horrific ghost stories in a deep, extraordinary voice that was beautiful and flamboyant as embroidered brocade.

  “Is he evil?” Caris did not remember evil.

  Salteris thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. But his motives have always been obscure. No one has ever, as far as I know, been able to tell what he would do, or why. He is, as I said, more powerful than any mage now living, including myself. But his mind is like a murky and bottomless well, into which all the wisdom of the ages and all the accumulated trivia of several universes have been indiscriminately dumped. He is both wise and innocent, incredibly devious and hopelessly scatterbrained, and by this time, I fear, quite mad.”

  Lady Rosamund shrugged with the grace that only years with a deportment master could impart. “He has always been mad.”

  “True. A smile flicked across the old man’s face. “But the problem with Antryg is that no one has ever been able to tell just how mad.” Then the lightness died from his eyes. “And for the past seven years he has been a prisoner in the Silent Tower, whose very stones are spelled against the working of magic. After that long, held prisoner by the Church and separated from the magic that is the core of any wizard’s being, I can only hope that Antryg Windrose is still sane enough to help us. For I fear that, if we are dealing with some threat from another world than our own, we may need his help very badly.”

  Chapter II

  **ERROR: UNRECOGNIZED CONDITION IN BINARY TREE STRUCTURE

  **CORRECT AND RE-TRY:

  OK>

  “Binary tree?” Joanna Sheraton groaned. “I just corrected the goddam binary tree.” Patiently, she typed:

  >SEARCH: TREE. DATA.0

  OK>

  >EXECUTE TIGER. REV8

  A moment later, green letters materialized on the gray of the screen:

  **ERROR: UNRECOGNIZED CONDITION IN BINARY TREE

  STRUCTURE

  **CORRECT AND RE-TRY:

  OK>

  “I’ll give you an unrecognized condition,” she muttered. She scanne
d up the screen, looking for anything else in the miles of data that could conceivably be preventing the running of the program. “Well, what’s wrong with it? You didn’t like my tone of voice? I didn’t say ‘Mother, may I’?” She tried again:

  >SEARCH: TREE.DATA.0

  OK>

  >EXECUTE TIGER.REV8

  **ERROR. UNRECOGNIZED CONDITION IN BINARY TREE STRUCTURE

  **CORRECT AND RE-TRY:

  OK>

  “You know, I’m getting very tired of your OK.” She pushed the soft tangle of her shoulder-length, too-curly blond hair from her eyes and reached for the much-thumbed program that rested on top of the precarious stacks of printouts, manuals, schematic drawings of Tiger missiles, and scrawly handwritten ads for the in-plant newspaper, the San Serano Spectrum, that heaped the desk on all sides of the keyboard. “And I’m also getting very tired of you,” she added, scanning the long, cryptic columns oh the screen. “You’re supposed to be the hottest mainframe west of Houston, you know. We shouldn’t have to play Twenty Questions in binary every time I want to run a...”

  Her hand froze in mid-gesture.

  There was someone out in the hall.

  But when she listened, she heard nothing but the faint hum of air conditioning. Even the massive radios of the janitorial staff, which generally. drove her to take long walks to the coffee machines in the far comers of Building Six, had ceased, she realized, some time ago.

  It occurred to her that it must be very late.

  Security, she told herself and turned back to the monitor.

  She didn’t believe it.

  She’d worked enough overtime, running analyses of missile test-flight results, to know well the sounds of the security staff as they patrolled the corridors. That swift, breathing rush of light footfalls outside her cubicle had nothing in common with the familiar hobnailed tread and jingle of keys.

  With reflex reassurance, part of her said, If it isn’t Security, Security will take care of it. Another part, with equally reflex dismissal, added, Don’t be silly. It was probably some poor technician wandering around looking for the john or for a coffee machine that still had coffee—or what passed, at San Serano, for coffee—in it at this hour, whatever this hour was.

  It was nothing to worry about.

  Nevertheless, Joanna worried.

  She was a small girl, with an air of compact sturdiness to her despite her rather delicate build. Ruth, the artist who lived downstairs from her, was of the often-expressed opinion that Joanna could be beautiful if she’d take the time, but Joanna had never seen the point of taking the time—or anyway not the hours a day Ruth put into it. Now she soundlessly hooked the toe of her sneaker under the pull of the desk drawer and slid the metal bin open far enough to allow her to dip into her mailsack of a purse and produce a hammer.

  Then she sat still and listened again. This time she heard nothing.

  It occurred to her that she had a throbbing headache. It must be after ten, she thought—there had still been people around when she’d started working on the program for analyzing the Tiger missile test results for next week’s Navy review. There was no telling how much longer she’d...

  Her eyes sought the green luminosity of the clock.

  2:00 a.m.

  Two! She could have sworn it wasn’t later than ten—well, eleven, since the janitors had gone home.

  No wonder I have a headache, she thought, and ran her hands through the feathery tangle of her hair. She recalled vaguely that she’d been too busy to eat dinner; in any case, she’d long ago given up buying the overpriced slumgullion doled out by the junk machines in the break-room to those who worked on after regular hours. That was the tricky thing about the whole San Serano Aerospace Complex she had learned. The cool, even, white lights never varied; the unscented air never altered its temperature; and as a result no one ever had a very clear idea of what time it was.

  But two in the morning...

  Without warning, a wave of despair crept over her, filling the farthest corners of her tired soul like cold and greasy dishwater. The uselessness of it all suddenly overpowered her—not only getting the program to run, or the tedious documentation that would have to follow, or the fact that the data was going to have to be altered tomorrow in any case. Her whole life seemed suddenly to open before her in a vista of uselessness, an empty freeway leading nowhere.

  It was strange to her, for she had, since she left her mother’s house, been pretty content with her solitary life. Maybe that was one of the things wrong with her, she reflected. She knew herself to be far less good with people than she was with machines—no matter what you looked like, a computer would never laugh at you behind your back. Computers never expected you to be capable of things you had not been taught to do, or cared one way or the other what you did in your spare time.

  She was familiar with the vague sense of an obligation to be other than she was—to be more like her bright and sociable co-workers—but she had never experienced this hollow, gray feeling of the futility of either staying as she was or changing to what she ought to be.

  The image of Gary Fairchild returned to her mind—handsome, smiling, and enamored. Her loneliness seemed suddenly overwhelming, her vacillations over his constant request for her to move in with him suddenly petty and futile. Why not? she thought. If this is all there is ever going to be... Maybe everybody’s right about living with someone, and I’m wrong...

  Yet the thought of giving up what she had filled her with the dread of some inevitable doom.

  Within her, a small voice struggled to insist, In any case there isn’t anything you can do about it at two in the morning. Tomorrow I’ll see him...

  As swiftly as it had come, the dull sense of hopeless grief ebbed away. Joanna blinked, rubbed her eyes, and wondered with the calm detachment that had gotten her into trouble in the past, What the hell was that all about?

  The thought that she had, for one second, seriously been planning to accede to Gary’s next demand that she live with him made her shudder. She might, she knew, be the sort of mousy little woman men never went out with, sealed like an anchoress in a chapel with a pile of books, computers, and cats, but it was preferable to the struggle between her conscientious efforts to please Gary, her boredom with watching TV in his enormous, gray-upholstered party room, and her sneaky sense that she’d rather be by herself, reading. It was not, she knew, the way she ought to act or feel about the man who loved her. But shame her though it did, it was how she felt, despite all her efforts to convince herself otherwise.

  I must be hungrier than I thought, she reflected. They say low blood sugar can make you depressed—they didn’t mention it could make you suicidal. With a sigh, she began backup procedures, to save what she’d done for tomorrow. At this point, she knew, she would make more errors through sheer exhaustion than she would correct. She chucked the floppies on top of the general heap. Her coworkers never believed her when she said that she located things in the heaps of printouts, programs, floppies, data, reports, management bulletins, journals, and ads on her desk by the oil company principle of geological stratification. They were all mystified by it—Joanna herself would scarcely have been surprised to find trilobites in the bottom layer.

  It was only when she stood up that she remembered the stealthy footfalls outside her cubicle.

  Don’t be silly, she told herself again. San Serano is a security installation. The idea that anyone could get in without being checked out by the guards is ridiculous.

  But somehow, she felt unconvinced.

  She patted the pockets of her faded jeans for her car keys, dug her purse—an enormous accessory of Hopi-weave and rabbit skins bulging with rolled-up printouts, computer journals, and an incredible quantity of miscellaneous junk—out of the desk drawer, and made a move to slip the hammer back into it. Then she hesitated. She’d feel awfully silly if she met a guard or a co-worker—what coworker’s going to be around at 2:00 a.m.?—walking down the corridor with a hammer in her ha
nd. But still...

  You are twenty-six years old, she told herself sharply. The odds against your meeting the boogieman in the corridors of the San Serano Bomb and Novelty Shop are astronomical.

  So were the odds against meeting a mocking and judgmental co-worker, but she compromised by sliding the hammer into her purse with the handle sticking out. Then, soundlessly, she pushed open the cubicle door and stepped into the corridor.

  Somehow, the bright lighting of the corridors made her uneasiness worse. The doors of the other cubicles she passed and the typing bullpen were wells of eerie, charcoal half-light, the machines all sleeping in unearthy silence. Corridors leading to the test labs on the other side of the building made ominous echo tunnels, which picked up the padded swish-swish of Joanna’s sneakers on the dark-blue carpet, incredibly loud in that brilliantly lit silence. Once or twice she glimpsed the industrial-strength cockroaches who lived in such numbers in the warm mazes of the backs of the equipment in the test labs, but that was the only other life she saw.

  Then light caught her eye.

  She stopped. Not the even white illumination of the fluorescents... Candlelight? No more than a finger-smudge of gold reflection against the metal molding of the half-open door of the main computer room.

  Fire? she thought, her pace quickening. The main computer room contained a lot of printout bins. The mainframe, a Cray the size of a Cadillac, the biggest defense computer west of Houston, could be tapped into by any of the desk stations, but there was a lot of work in the computer room itself. There was no smoking in the room, but one of the yobos on the janitorial staff might have dropped a cigarette into a trash bin, though the light looked too small and too steady for a fire.