The Silicon Mage Page 7

  The sliding panel had admitted them into another room along the garden side of the house, this one a sort of private bookroom-cum-study filled with Cerdic’s usual collection of statues of the Old Gods, tomes of cantrip and quackery, star-mandallas, and armillary spheres. From it the two girls had stepped through another French window into the gardens, crossing to the nearest copse of trees and taking one of the winding paths that would lead, eventually, to the other palaces of the grounds and to the outer gates where Magister Magus’ coach awaited Joanna. In spite of the sharp-edged sunlight, the afternoon was quite cold, but by tacit consent neither suggested returning to search for their cloaks.

  The Princess sniffled, and Joanna dug into the deep pocket of her dress for a clean handkerchief to offer her. Pella was not the delicate type of girl who could cry without rendering herself hideous; her nose was swollen, and her face, under a layer of half-wiped-off cosmetics, reddened in fading blotches. Kyssha, trotting at the hem of her swagged petticoats, looked up at her and whined in concern, and Pella reached down and took the little dog into the crook of her arm.

  Joanna sighed. “I realize this is a stupid question under the circumstances, but can I do anything? Short of murdering Pharos, that is—though honestly I don’t think Cerdic would be an improvement as a ruler.”

  Pella glanced quickly at her again, as if to reassure herself of the jesting tone in her voice. In spite of the japes about it, her height wasn’t excessive, though at five-nine or so she was a head taller than Joanna and the diminutive Prince. It was her air of hesitancy which made her seem clumsy and outsize, something not helped by the bouffant extravagance of her gown. “It’s all right,” she said wearily. “I suppose I’d agree with Gaire about—it—if I didn’t know what kind of ruler Cerdic would make.” She gave her eyes a final wipe, completing the ruin of her makeup, and stroked Kyssha’s head protectively. The little dog licked at her hands and whined again, shivering in the sharpness of the wind. Pella’s mouth twitched in a bitter expression far older than her years. “Do you know Gaire well?”

  “I did,” said Joanna softly. “Once.”

  “I didn’t know he’d come back.” They emerged from the trees into a long, formal parterre which must have been like close-napped green velvet in the summer, brown now and edged with naked trees gray as pewter in the changeable brightness of the day. “Tell me about him.”

  Joanna shook her head. “I don’t know if I can. It’s—it’s hard to explain.”

  “I have to know.”

  The urgency in her voice and the intentness of those hazel-green eyes stopped Joanna. She stood looking up at the girl, sensing the echo of that hateful sensation of knowing but of having no proof. Suraklin must have tried to put the influence of his mind over hers; she had fled him, not knowing why.

  Then, rather quickly, Pella looked away. “He comes and goes. Nobody knows anything about him. Except what signifies—that he’s Cerdic’s latest fad, his ‘Spiritual Advisor,’ which is what he calls himself so no one can point to him and say ‘wizard.’ But he is a wizard, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said softly.

  Pellicida let out her breath in another short little sigh and stood for a time, cradling her little dog in her arms, staring out across the two acres of flawlessly smooth brown lawn toward the gilded roof trees of the Imperial Palace, visible beyond the cindery lace of the trees. “He made me...” she began, and broke off. Then she said, “I didn’t even like him—I didn’t understand what happened. I haven’t—haven’t ever been in love, but I didn’t think it could be like that. It was a spell, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said, guessing what had happened and why Pellicida had run from him rather than face him again. After a moment she added, “I think legally that counts as rape—or it should, anyway.”

  Pellicida’s glance was wry, to hide a hurt that had clearly been one of many in the last wretched month. She started walking again, a solitary figure, like a huge pink peony dropped on the sepia ground. The wind pulled loose strands of her black hair from their ridiculous masses of curls and tangled them with the dog’s silky fur. “Did he do that to you?”

  “He tried.”

  “Because you could be useful to him?”

  Joanna nodded. She wondered morbidly whether, if she had agreed, he would have imitated Gary’s rather unsatisfying sexual technique.

  “Why did he do it?” Pella asked, as if asking about something that had been done to someone other than herself. “To get me to—to connive at his killing Pharos?”

  She was a stranger in a strange land, a world alien to her own customs and wants, eighteen years old and married to a man who scorned and humiliated her. She held herself straight as any of the marble statues of heroes that lined the parterre, her profile cut like stone against the dark chaos of her hair.

  Joanna said, “Probably.”

  “Tell me about him,” Pella said again. “There’s something about him, something evil... I don’t know. Tell me who he is, and what he wants; tell me what’s going on.”

  During winters in Angelshand, dawn came late; in the pre-solstice depths, a heatless daylight lasted five or six hours. Now, with autumn fully come, workers sought the grim riverside factories in darkness. The bells of the city’s many churches were tolling matins. In summer the sky would have already been pale. Unnaturally clear and cold for this season of the year, the stars blazed queerly above the black angles of jutting roofs.

  Stonne Caris, grandson of the dead Archmage Salteris Solaris, thrust his hands into the sleeves of his padded jacket and shivered as he strode the silent alleyways. In spite of the unseasonal clearness of the predawn darkness, it was bitterly cold. Usually at this hour of the morning from where he stood at the top of Threadneedle Street, where its cobbled slope turned down toward the river, nothing could be seen but a sea of white mist rising from that oily brown expanse, but now even the winking nets of riding lights on the ships in the harbor seemed to dance in the dark. It made him uneasy, with a strange sense of things not being as they should be. But his mageborn eyes showed him nothing to fear in the darkness of the alleys around him, and his hearing, trained through grueling blindfold obstacle courses, spoke of no danger. Still, he hesitated for a moment at the top of the street, as if his nose could tell him what was wrong.

  But all he smelled was the usual fishy reek of the bare mudflats below the granite embankments and, more strongly than usual, the nauseating whiff of spoiling meat and cheese from the garbage dump near the Grand Market.

  Cautiously, he felt the pistol he had taken from Joanna, thrust through his sword sash, hard against his stomach through the padding of coat, jacket, and shirt. He slid his sword, still in its sheathe, from his sash; carrying the sheathe loosely in his left hand, he descended to the flats, his footfalls a moist whisper in the iron dawn.

  He was pleased to find the mudflats empty. At this hour they often weren’t—during the summer they were a favorite dueling ground for young blades with scores to settle. Generally the coming of the autumn mists put a stop to such proceedings. This morning, however, was exceptionally clear. His breath escaped him in a cold thread of white. Somewhere a dog barked, but he missed the crying of the gulls usually to be found arguing over the river garbage left by the turn of the tide.

  He stopped, puzzling for a moment over that.

  Upriver and down, dull orange lights glowed in kitchen windows of the dark houses that overhung the embankments. Across the rippling sheet of the water, the lights of the massive St. Cyr fortress gleamed unnaturally bright. An icy skiff of wind tugged at his cropped blond hair. He slipped the sword sheathe back into his sash and took out the gun.

  When he had taken it from Joanna, he had assumed it was a gun like any other. Only when he had examined it later, after he had come off-shift in his duties as guard at the Mages’ Yard, did he realize that, in their weaponry as well as their strange machines, Joanna’s people were vastly different from his own. The weapon itself was alie
n to those with which he was familiar, but the principles were the same. Instead of a ball, it fired pointed projectiles, encapsuled in what he guessed were cartridges already filled with premeasured loads, apparently loaded from the breech instead of the muzzle. In addition, this weapon had a revolving chamber, holding six bullets.

  Lost in admiration of the efficiency of it, he had at first not realized what it could mean—that a weapon existed which fired several times in rapid succession.

  When he realized it, it had shaken him to the roots.

  The air down here was still, though he could now hear the rising whine of wind across the roofs of the houses above him. The cold damped much of the smell of the mudflats. It was not an ideal place for his experiment—it was more open here than it had been in the Mages’ Yard on the night of Thirle’s murder, and there was some movement of air—but it would do.

  He pointed the gun downriver, aiming high in the air, braced both his hands on the butt in case it kicked more strongly than an ordinary pistol, and squeezed the trigger. Instantly the flat crack of it echoed out across the water; there was no delay between the fall of the hammer and the ignition of the powder, and it hardly kicked at all. He fired a second shot immediately, the cylinder revolving with deadly, beautiful smoothness into place. There was a little flash. That was all.

  There was very little smell of powder and no smoke whatsoever.

  Caris felt his stomach sink.

  This is none of my business, he thought despairingly. I shouldn’t even be here. I am sasennan of the Council—it isn’t up to me to decide right and wrong. Antryg confessed to the murder of Thirle and other things besides...

  But the murder was done with a gun like this one.

  Where had he gotten it?

  The thought intruded itself into his mind that Joanna could have been right.

  And if that is the case...

  The wind was rising as Caris strode up the steep angle of Threadneedle Street again. Black clouds had moved in to blot the stars. The ships at rest in the harbor began to rock uneasily, like horses tied in a barn, nervous at a sudden whiff of smoke.

  As he made his way back through the alleys to the Ghetto, Caris remembered the scene. It was his dreams that had wakened him then, troubled, inchoate dreams of loss—his dreams and the fading of his magic. His powers had never been much, but once before he had sensed their waning; that second time, waking in the muggy, stinking heat of the summer night, it had been like death. He had, he remembered, some notion of crossing the Yard from the house where the sasenna slept to see if his grandfather was back, but with the desolation that had come over him, it had suddenly seemed pointless. It was as if, with his magic, all hope had been bled from the world.

  Then he had heard Thirle scream.

  Thirle had been standing in the mouth of the alley known as Stinking Lane, the alley where that dreadful Gate of darkness had opened through the Void. He had been shot from the shadows of the houses on the opposite side of the square, and from those shadows a man had come running. A second shot had been fired at Caris, but he did not know, now that he thought of it, whether the fleeing man had fired it, or it had come from the shadows of the houses, like the first.

  The killer had not been the man he had seen—the man who had run back through the Void—at all, but rather someone who had remained in the Court, who had fired the shots to cover the fugitive’s tracks and to get Thirle out of the way.

  Although Caris’ memories of that time were surprisingly blurred—due, he supposed, to the draining hopelessness which had been on him then—it came to him now that the aim had been startlingly good for a running man’s.

  The first spits of rain were beginning to fall by the time he reached the Mages’ Yard.

  It made it easier for him. Though no sasennan would take shelter to the neglect of his duties, the noise of the wind howling through the narrow alleyways around the Yard would cover any sounds he might make better than the foggy stillness typical of autumn. After his grandfather’s death, there had been talk of the narrow little house being taken over by the Lady Rosamund, but nothing had been done about it yet. The place had been locked and fear-spells put on the doors and windows; Caris could see them, glowing faintly through the slashing rain. He had not the power to override them, but simply his awareness of them—his knowledge that they were merely spells—let him force the catches on the rear window and scramble through with hammering heart, where an ordinary housebreaker would have thought better of the entire project.

  The whole house spoke to him of his grandfather, with a terrible immediacy which brought back all his grief and rage at the old man’s death.

  If Joanna had been right...

  Had there been a time when he had changed?

  Standing in the close, crowded darkness of the narrow room that had been Salteris’ study, while the rain slammed dementedly against the window glass as if hurled from buckets, Caris let his mind rove back.

  He had not seen his grandfather from the time he was thirteen until he was eighteen, nearly two years ago now; he was aware that there was no greater gap in perceptions than that which existed between those two ages. His memories of his grandfather before that were a child’s memories—running behind the old man through the sweet-marshes of the river Strebwell, hunting polliwogs while the Archmage gathered mallows or observed the comings and goings of birds. One summer there had been an epidemic of little pox in the village, and Caris had been drafted as assistant to brew tisanes and hunt herbs. Later his grandfather, still young, with the wiry strength of wizards, had stripped to a breechclout, braided back his long dark hair, and had helped Caris and the few villagers who were still on their feet get the hay in. Caris remembered as if it were yesterday the shine of drying sweat on the muscles of Salteris’ arms and back as he’d sat with the other villagers under shelter, drinking beer as the rains swept in over the stubble fields; he remembered the thick, green smell of the air, heady as brandy, and Salteris’ joyful laughter.

  Since Caris had come to serve the Council of Mages as sasennan, since he had sworn his unthinking allegiance to his grandfather as head of that Council, he had not heard his grandfather laugh. He thought the glint of ironic mockery in the old man’s eyes was new, but couldn’t be sure; he did not remember in any of his childhood the haughty touchiness of temper which had characterized the wizard lately, nor that suave note in the voice which seemed to speak of some private joke with himself at his listener’s expense. It might, Caris had thought, have had something to do with his grandmother’s death, which had happened after he had gone to Innkitar to begin his training as sasennan; it might simply have been that, as a child, he had not seen that side of his grandfather.

  Or it might be as Joanna had said.

  If it was, he thought, sudden heat firing through his veins, it was Suraklin who killed him—Suraklin who ended that laughter, who stripped away that joyful life. Suraklin the Dark Mage...

  I will kill him, he thought. Dear God, I will kill him...

  Antryg, too, he realized, had loved Salteris. If what Joanna said was true—if Suraklin had left his grandfather alive and imbecile, to go on to this other man, this man of her world who understood computers—what must it have cost Antryg to kill in mercy the part that was left?

  Stop it, he told himself. Stop it until you have proof.

  He knew in his heart that the Way of the Sasenna is not to ask for proof. The Council had decided; it was no longer his affair. Nevertheless, he began to search the darkened study.

  As it had been in Salteris’ lifetime, the room was crowded with books, tablets, charts, astrolabes, and armillaries, but scrupulously neat. The old man’s desk towered above it all in its little niche near the fire, like some massive black castle, turreted and crenellated with scroll-edged pigeonholes and a treasure house of secret compartments. A couple of candleholders arched out over the slanted writing surface, but the waxen shafts they bore were unburned and covered with dust. Salteris had seldom bot
hered to light them when he worked, seeing, as all mageborn could, in the dark.

  Caris’ own sight in darkness was not as good as most mages’, but it would have to suffice. The wind, which had risen to a screaming frenzy over the rooftops, would cover any noises he might make, but he could not hide light.

  Methodically, he searched.

  His grandmother, Salteris’ wife in all but name for forty years, had told him of this desk, fascinating him with its marvels while he, a fair-haired child with dirt on his hands, sat on her knee. His fingers, light and sure as a craftsman’s, probed delicately for hidden springs and secret doors, compartments tucked into what appeared to be mere partitions. Outside, the wind howled down from the north, driving sleet and rain before it; in the darkness around him, the old house rocked uneasily on its timbers. In one compartment he found his grandfather’s porcelain flute—a flute that he remembered the old man playing for his grandmother, but had not heard Salteris play since.

  In another, he found a handful of bullets. There was no mistaking them—point-nosed, gleaming, wrapped in their brass cartridges. He drew the gun from his sash, and broke open the cylinder; they were too large to fit, but clearly of the same manufacture. A little more search of the desk yielded the gun itself. Two of its chambers were empty.

  Caris set the gun down on the desk. He was so angry his hands shook, cold, furious rage that felt queerly impersonal in its intensity. Suraklin had murdered his grandfather, years ago, calmly, greedily, tricking him with a play of friendship and understanding in his former guise as the Emperor Hieraldus until he was ready to strike. He had murdered poor Thirle, stout and affable and trusting, simply because he was in the way. Who knew how many others besides? He had used Caris’ love, twisted and tricked him and tried to manipulate him into killing the one man who might have been able to offer effective opposition.

  Caris’ fisted hands tightened until the bones hurt.