The Silent Tower Page 4

  It was, as she had thought, a candle. An old-fashioned tin candle holder, rested on a corner of the monitor desk. A gold edge of light danced over the dark edges of the three massive monoliths of the Cray, over the huge six-foot graphics projection monitor screens and the smaller CRTs and keyboards. As she came up the slight ramp, which raised the level of the room above the subfloor wiring, the single red eye of the power-light regarded her somberly beside that seed of anachronistic brightness.

  Now what the hell was a candle... ?

  It was her natural nervous timidity that saved her. She knew she hadn’t heard the man behind her, but it was as if, half-ready, she felt the dark shape loom up behind her a moment before hands closed around her throat. Certainly her hands were there, clutching at the long, cold fingers as they tightened; she cow-kicked back and up, half-conscious of her foot tangling with fabric.

  The grip loosened and fumbled; the gray, buzzing roar, which had filled her ears and the terrible clouded feeling in her head abated for one instant, and she whipped her right hand down to the hammer ready in her purse. There was breath, hot against her temple, and the smell of wood-smoke, old wool, and herbs in her nostrils. She struck back over her left shoulder with all her strength.

  Then she was falling. Her head struck the floor, hard under the thin, coarse nylon of the rug. She had a last, confused glimpse of the candle propped before the monitor, of a shadow bending over her—of something else on the wall...

  She came to choking on ammonia. Her flailing fist was caught in a large, black hand, her scream was nothing more than a wheezing croak.

  The face bending over hers focused—worried, black, and middle-aged. “You all right, miss?”

  She blinked, her heart hammering and her whole body shaking with an adrenaline rush that nearly turned her sick. The upside-down beam of a flashlight at floor level gleamed brassily off a security badge and made dark lines along the regulation creases of the guard’s light-blue shirt as he helped her to sit up.

  “Did you get him?” she asked confusedly.

  “Who?”

  Her hands fumbled under the tangle of her blond hair, to feel the bruises on her throat. She swallowed, and it hurt. Her head ached—she realized she was lucky she’d hit the slight give of the raised floor and not the cement subfloor beneath. “Somebody was in here. He grabbed me from behind...” She looked back at the desk. The candle was gone.

  The guard removed a walkie-talkie from his belt. “Ken? Art here. We’ve got a report of an intruder in Building Six, near the main computer room.” He turned back to her. “Did you get a look at him?”

  She shook her head. “He was taller than me...” She stopped herself ruefully. Everyone was taller than she. “But I think I heard him walking in the hallways earlier.”

  “What time?” he asked.

  “About two. I—I saw a light in here.”

  “And he attacked you with this?” The guard held up the hammer, protected from his hand by a handkerchief and gripped by the very end of the handle.

  Joanna blushed. “No,” she said, feeling very foolish. “I had that in my purse.”

  The guard cast a startled glance at her purse, then saw the size of it and nodded at least partial understanding.

  “I sometimes carry one when I know I’m going to be working overtime,” she hastened to fib, because she generally carried one as a matter of course. “For walking across the parking lot.” This wasn’t as odd as it sounded—San Serano was situated in the dry chaparral hills beyond Agoura, as deserted an area as you could get that close to L.A. Though parking lot crime was generally limited to the more ostentatious vehicles—’Vettes, Porsches, and four-wheelers—being looted or stolen outright, it was still a spooky walk across the enormous paved emptiness late at night.

  The guard’s walkie-talkie crackled. He listened, then said, “We’ve called on extra people. They’ll be here to search the plant in about twenty minutes. He’s not going to get away.”

  But that was, in point of fact, precisely what he did do. Joanna sat in the guard shack—actually a modest cement-block building near the plant’s main gate on Lost Canyon Road—drinking tea and feeling conspicuous and hideously embarrassed, listening to the reports come in and answering questions put to her by the guard. Every door and entrance to Building Six was checked, and found to be inviolate. The building itself was methodically quartered by teams of security officers, and nothing was found.

  At four, Joanna went home. She’d toyed with the notion of calling Gary, because the idea of returning to her apartment in Van Nuys alone tonight was somehow frightening, but she discarded it. This late, Gary would argue that she should come and spend the night with him, since his house was just over the hill, and she was in no mood for the “But why don’t you want to?” argument that she knew would follow. Why she didn’t want to was a question she’d never been able to answer to either Gary’s satisfaction or her own—it was too often easier to consent than to explain.

  In the end, the guards walked her out to her solitary old blue Pinto sitting in the parking lot, and she drove down the dark canyons to the freeway and the brighter lights of the Valley. She wasn’t sure just why the thought of going home alone would frighten her. When she reached it, the place was quiet and normal as ever; but when she finally slept, toward six, it was not restful sleep.

  No trace of an intruder was ever found.

  Chapter III

  THE SILENT TOWER STOOD ten miles from the ancient royal city of Kymil, separated from it by the sheet-steel curve of the River Pon, and by the silver-and-green patchwork of the Ponmarish, where sheep and pigs foraged among the boggy pools and town children hunted frogs in the long summer evenings. As Caris and his grandfather crossed the long causeway toward the old city gates of Kymil in the hush of the endless dusk, farmers and the river-trade merchants who made the money of the town drew aside from the sight of the old man’s long black robes, making the sign against evil. The folk of Kymil had long memories and reason to fear the mageborn, even Sal-teris Solaris.

  From the causeway, Caris could see the Tower, lonely on its hill; a finger raised in warning.

  A warning, certainly, that no mage ever forgot.

  A stage line ran between Angelshand and Kymil; though, like the Old Believers, the mages did not travel by stage, it meant that the roads were good. Two nights on the road, Caris and his grandfather had lodged in peasant huts, and once in the self-consciously rustic country villa of a wealthy merchant from Angelshand who had conversed with earnest condescension all through dinner about “the hidden strength of these ancient beliefs,” and whose daughters had stolen downstairs after the household had gone to bed to ask Salteris to read their fortunes in the cards. Two nights they had slept under the stars. Caris worried that, in spite of the warmth of the fading summer, a chill might have settled into the old man’s bones. Still, Salteris was tough. Like most sasenna, Caris slept only lightly, and when he had wakened in the night, it had always been to see Salteris sitting in silent meditation, gazing at the stars.

  At the highest point of the causeway, Caris paused to shift his knapsack across his shoulders. Around the feet of the raised roadway and along the walls, just out of reach of the marshpools, were the hovels of the poor, built each spring when the waters went down and abandoned with their winter rising. Now children in rags were playing in between the sorry little huts, shouting and throwing pebbles at one another; a religious procession appeared, en route from one of the numerous shrines, which dotted the marshes, and a whiff of incense and the sweetness of chanting rose to where he and his grandfather stood. People in the shantytown below paused to bend a knee to the gray-robed priests, as did half-naked boatmen from the river and a scarf vendor decorated like a Yule tree with his wares; a merchant crossing the causeway behind them, in his sober blue broadcloth coat and breeches, did likewise, and Caris felt the man’s eyes on his back when neither he nor Salteris made this sign of subservience to the Church’s will.


  “We can stay at the House of the Mages in the city tonight,” Salteris remarked, looking out past the marshes to the silence of the pale hills beyond. The hills marked the edge of the Sykerst, the empty lands that stretched eastward two thousand miles, an eternal, rolling plain of grass. “Nandiharrow runs it—the Old Faith has always been strong in this city, and many of those who came here twenty-five years ago for the trial of Suraklin found welcome enough among them to make it their home.”

  A touch of wind moved across the hills, murmuring among the willows at the level of their feet and bringing the wild scents of distance and hay. “Suraklin was tried here?”

  “Indeed, my son.” The old man sighed. “Tried and executed.” The breeze flicked at his white hair, he gazed into those undefinable distances, with no elation for the memory of his ancient triumph.

  “I didn’t know,” Caris said softly. “I thought, since the Emperor presided over it—the Prince, then—it must have taken place in Angelshand.”

  A wry expression pulled at the corner of me old man’s mourn. “It is difficult to try someone for the misuse of his wizardry in a city where few believe in it,” he said. “Suraklin was known in Kymil. Even those who did not think that his powers stemmed from magic dared not cross him.” He nodded out toward the silent hills. “His Citadel stood out there. They have thrown down the standing-stones mat marked the road that led there, at least those that were visible from the city; the Citadel itself was razed, and its very stones we calcined with fire. The Tower...”

  In the blue-gray softness of the dusk, Caris saw the old man’s white brows draw down, bringing with them a whole laddering of wrinkles along his high forehead.

  “The Silent Tower had stood there of old, but we strengthened its walls—I and the other members of the Council. We put our spells into its stones, spells of nullification, of void. We fashioned the Sigil of Darkness from the signs of the stars and the Seal of the Dead God, which binds and cripples a mage’s power, and that we placed upon the doors, so that no mage could pass. In the Silent Tower Suraklin awaited his trial. From it he was taken to his death.”

  He turned away. “Come,” he said quietly. “It is not good to talk of such things.” And he led the way along the dusty causeway toward the square, gray gates of the city.

  They passed the night in the House of the Mages, a big, rambling structure in the heart of Kymil down near the river. Like most buildings in Kymil, it was built of wood; unlike most, it was fancifully decorated, with odd carvings and archways, small turrets and little stairways leading nowhere, balconies whose railings were carved into intricate openwork filigrees of flowers and leaves overlooking miniature gardens no larger than a single flowerbed, but so thick with vines that their small central fountains could scarcely be seen. Most of the buildings in Kymil, Caris noticed, were rather plainly built, and often garishly painted, pink or daffodil or a hard phthalo blue. One, near the gates as they entered the town, was illustrated in a wealth of architectural detail that the building itself did not possess—colonnades, friezes, facades, balconies, and marble statuary in niches, all painted in careful detail upon its flat wood sides. None of them appeared to be much more than twenty years old.

  “That wasn’t Suraklin’s doing, was it?” he asked later that night of Le, second-in-command of the small troop of sasenna attached to the House of the Mages.

  The dark, blade-slim woman nodded. “There was a deal of destruction wreaked in the town when the mages broke his power,” she said. “Other houses were destroyed later and were found to have the Dark Mage’s mark in them, drawn on a wall or a doorpost.” She glanced across at him out of jet-bead eyes under her short crop of dark hair, then up at the head of the hall, where the mages of the house were talking quietly over their after-dinner wine. The four or five sasenna who had table service that night were moving quietly about in the dim candlelight, clearing up. There was rumored to be a poker game starting up in the barrack-quarters, but, like those they had sworn to serve, Caris and Le had lingered over a last cup of wine to talk before going to investigate.

  “But what would it matter, after Suraklin was dead?” Caris was familiar with the principle of wizards’ marks, though to make one was far beyond his rudimentary powers.

  Le shook her head. “They say they weren’t only to guide him there and let him enter where he’d been before. They say that, through the marks, he could influence the minds of those who were much near them; sway them to his thoughts from afar; sense things through them, even, in his dreams. It might be only stories, for folk feared him enough to believe anything of him, but then again...”

  “Did you ever see him?”

  The full mouth curved, but the expression could hardly be termed a smile. They were sitting at one of the long refectory tables in the lower part of the hall, the last of the sasenna to leave; at the other low table, parallel to theirs like the arms of a U below the main board where the mages sat, and nearer the vast, empty darkness of the fireplace, a couple of novices discussed spells with the earnestness of new explorers in some strange and wonderful world. The novices’ table would be the more comfortable in the winter, but in the summer, with the diamond-paned casements that punctuated the length of the room thrown open to let in the milky warmth of the hay-smelling night, there was no comparison.

  “I only saw him the once,” Le said. “I was eight. I saw him die and saw what was left of his body strung up and burned. The Church’s Witchfinders wanted to have him burned alive, but your friend the Archmage...” She nodded toward the head table, where Salteris sat, slender hands folded, fingers extended against his lips, nodding gravely to something the big, stout, graying mage Nandi-harrow was saying. “...wouldn’t have it. The Church has no jurisdiction over those who have sworn their vows to the Council and, though they needed the Church’s might to subdue him, the Church would not be given the right to kill a mage—any mage.” She pushed the sleeves of her loose black jacket up on her arms, and Caris saw, with some envy, the scars of half a dozen fights in a white zigzag over the fine, hard muscle of her forearms. “But as for Suraklin, I doubt it made any difference to him by that time. I don’t know what the Council and the Witchfinders and the Prince did to him, but I remember he came to the block broken, stumbling, and silent. He never so much as raised a hand against the headsman’s sword.”

  Her words returned to Caris’ mind the next morning as he and the Archmage left the city by the Stone Road Gate and took the track that wound toward the hills. In the marshes near the town, the road was well-repaired and used; down in the lowlands, all around them, men and women were cutting hay from the common lands of the city corporation, carting it in wheelbarrows or on their backs to the higher ground to dry, their voices and laughter rising from all around like the cries of unusually noisy marsh birds. But away from the town, the road quickly dwindled to a narrow track; though it saw some use, Caris could tell that it had been long since much traffic had passed over it. As they passed into the green, silent folds of those treeless hills, he saw where huge standing-stones had once lined its sides, but had been thrown down and were now half-buried in the long summer grass.

  “This was the road to Suraklin’s Citadel?” he asked softly, unwilling to break the hush of the hills.

  The old man seemed to wake from some private meditation at the sound of Caris’ voice. “Yes, it led to his fortress. But the road was older than he—these stones were cracked with a thousand winters before ever he made people curse them as his.”

  Caris frowned, looking at the fallen menhirs. Another such line ran near Angelshand, mile after mile of ancient stones, standing like sentries in the deep grass, guarding what had long been forgotten. The Devil’s Road, they called it. “What were they?” he asked, but his grandfather, relapsing into thoughts of his own, only shook his head.

  On the hill to their left, the Silent Tower rose, dark gray against the wind-combed emerald silk of the grass that lapped against them on all sides.

  Caris saw
now that it was more than the single finger of stone he had seen from the causeway. A curtain wall surrounded it, pierced by a single gate; the portcullis was down, unusual for daytime; through it, he saw what looked like a small monastic barracks. People were moving about inside, some in the black uniforms of sasenna, others, with the shaven heads of priests, in white. Near the gate, he got a glimpse of someone robed like a monk, but in flame-red rather than gray, the staff of a wizard in his hand. One of the Church Wizards, the Red Dogs. For the first time he felt uneasy at the thought of entering those walls.

  “It’s all right,” Salteris said softly. “They don’t see us yet.”

  They stood within full view of the gate, but Caris knew better than to question the Archmage’s statement. From his robes the old man drew a small wash-leather bag and, opening it, tipped a little ball of what looked like hard-baked dough onto his palm.

  “This is a lipa,” he said. Looking more closely, Caris saw that it was, in fact, made out of dough. Runes had been scratched into it with a pin or a fine stylus, covering its surface with an almost invisible net of tracery. “Keep it where you can get to it. Should any harm befall me, or should you and I be separated for more than three hours, burn it. The other mages will come.” He pulled shut the strings of the bag again and handed it to Caris, never taking his eyes from the gates of the Silent Tower.

  He started to move off again, but Caris held him back, troubled. “If Antryg’s a prisoner, he can’t work magic against you, surely?”

  Salteris smiled. “Antryg is the least of my worries at the moment. No, he cannot work magic in the Silent Tower—but then, neither can I. Once within its walls, I will be only an old man, alone among people whose relations with the mageborn have always been at best a guarded truce. There has been no trouble between the Church and the Council of Wizards since Isar Challadin’s time—but the Church is old. They watch and they wait.” His dark eyes warmed with wry amusement. “I should not like to be the first one to hear of a surprise attack.”