The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (20 page)

He took a step away along the brink of the huge pit, then hesitated. “I should leave you here,” he said after a moment. “But I don't know what defenses will be in operation, or if there's a delay-trigger and it's already too late to escape. It's hard to believe Suraklin would leave it this late—unless he's down there himself, waiting...” He paused, and Joanna thought that, against his black coat collar with its gilded braid, he seemed very pale. It occurred to her that Suraklin's aim of killing Antryg might only have been a contingency plan if he could not take him—his first, chosen, and well-prepared victim—alive.

“The trouble is,” Antryg went on, “I can't feel a thing amiss here, and that's making me very uneasy.”

“It's making you uneasy?” Joanna said, with a shaky grin in spite of the uncomfortable slamming of her heart against her ribs.

He grinned back. “Stay close, and be ready to...” He stopped, his head coming up like a dog's that scents sudden peril. “Oh, pox.”

“What is it?” Joanna whispered.

“The Witchfinders,” he said softly. “Peelbone.”

“Antryg...” Caris sprang lightly up to the top of the broken platform. “Can you hear it? Along the energy-track...”

“Peelbone, yes.”

“Can you use some kind of spell... ?”

“They have hasu with them. Besides, apart from blowing a trumpet I can't think of a better way to let Suraklin know I'm here. Look, there they are...”

He pointed at the dark line of shapes on the colorless gray of the northern slopes. There was a red splash, like a drop of blood—a Church dog's robes. One thin gray form among them spurred his horse and began to canter down the slope.

“They must have been watching through a spyglass from a distance,” Antryg said, catching Joanna's hand and hurrying along the top of the platform. “Peelbone knows me, of course. He was in charge of obtaining my—confession.”

“Look!” Caris pointed to the western slopes above the Citadel; a dozen black forms could be seen riding down them. There was a thin glitter of drawn weapons in the heatless light.

“Where are Suraklin's defenses now when we need them?” Antryg wondered aloud.

“Should we split up?”

“Good heavens, no! Make for the pits...”

Caris skidded to a stop. “Are you mad? If the defenses are anywhere, they'll be...”

Clear and thin as the cracking of ice, Peelbone's voice rang across the broken Citadel. “Windrose!” He drew rein momentarily on the edge of the buckled pavement of what had been the court before the main keep, rising in his stirrups, his wispy gray hair streaming in the restless tweak of the wind. His hat had blown off; his eyes were hard and colorless as glass. “I should have known you would come here, back to the hold of your master!” The sasenna and the hasu behind him, galloping hard, had almost reached the edge of the pavement; the Witchfinder put spurs to his lathered horse and started across.

With a thin whine of steel Caris' sword was in his hand.

What happened then was almost totally without warning. In later nightmares Joanna saw it again in slow-motion and realized then that it was a thing she had dimly taken for a domed hummock of weed-covered stone which moved, bursting upward into the air as the horse trod on it in a flurrying scatter of dirt. But at the time it seemed as if it came from nowhere—as if suddenly it was hanging over the Witchfinder and his terrified mount, a huge, dustcolored thing like a monster jellyfish, slobbering tentacles dangling...

Adrenaline locked her lungs and circulatory system shut even before Peelbone began screaming. Sasenna were converging from all directions. Antryg grabbed Joanna's arm and made a run for the ragged spill of fallen stone and weeds that had been the head of the secret stair. From the tail of her eye Joanna saw Peelbone's horse running frenziedly in circles, the tentacles raking its flesh and almost wholly enveloping the shrieking, clawing man on its back as the floating body of the abomination lowered itself, like the canopy of a vast parachute, down over Peelbone's head.

She had no time to see more. Deep under the weeds were the broken rubble of old stairs. She clung to the brittle stems for balance as Antryg guided her down. Below the level of the pit edge, the weeds ended, leaving only a crumbling spiral of iced and treacherous gravel. Above her, she heard voices shouting, one scream riding over them. Dear God, she thought, how long will it take him to die?

Her feet slipped. She half fell, half rolled the last few yards, down what felt like a ladder of sharp and broken stone. Antryg pulled her to her feet and through a half-fallen archway like a skull's empty eyesocket, Caris panting and cursing at their heels. “What do you think you're... ?” the sasennan demanded hoarsely, as Antryg slipped his hand behind a shattered pilaster now barely distinguishable from its parent rock and cursed. He slid his sword scabbard clear of his sash, wedged it like a lever into the masonry and wrenched. Like the cries of some alien bird, the screams still drifted down to them, scarcely human anymore. A dark slot of ground opened in the grayer darkness.

Antryg thrust her unceremoniously through and was slipping after her when Caris grabbed his arm in a crushing hold. “You idiot... !”

“Oh, surely not!” the mad wizard protested. “Insane I may be, but not an idiot.” With an easy movement of his elbow, he disengaged his arm from the baffled young man's grip. Dim daylight flicked along one spectacle rim, picked out the fracture in the glass and the facet of an earring. More soberly, he added, “They're never going to believe I didn't summon that thing. Most men would kill Peelbone for the things he did to me. And to Joanna,” he added softly, touching her shoulder in the darkness. “And to you.”

“And that's your reason for blundering straight into the heart of Suraklin's traps?” Caris' whisper was almost a scream of rage.

“Well, the odd thing is,” Antryg murmured, “we don't seem to have sprung a one.” He slipped the scabbard casually back into his sash; Caris still held his, ready to draw and do battle. “We must needs have come here in any case, Caris. If it's a trap, it's a very good one. We might as well see the rest of it.”

They moved forward, into a species of Hell in darkness. It was a darkness that chittered and whispered or, worse, simply seemed to watch them in waiting silence beyond the faint foxlight glow that Antryg called above his head. Twice he killed the light, quickly, and thrust his companions back against the wall; in the darkness, Joanna heard the slimy dragging noise that heaved itself slowly along the passageway and felt the clammy cold that seeped in the creature's wake. Against her arm, she felt Caris' muscles tighten in utter revulsion and horror. He was mageborn, she remembered. He could see in the dark.

Other things fled from the light, sometimes white, squamous shapes like naked and legless pigs, other times the more prosaic vermin of this world, swarming black roaches and rats that had clustered around rotting carrion of no shape known to her, whose putrefying stench poisoned the air. In one place Antryg whispered to them not to touch the bubbling orange mold that covered the whole side of one rock-hewn chamber. Snared in it, Joanna saw two or three other abominations of various sizes, all of them rotting, but none of them completely dead. There were rats and roaches there, too, gummed likewise in the putrid growth; by the faint, glittering radiance of Antryg's witchlight, she could see that several of the roaches were close to the size of dinner plates, and the rats displayed unspeakable mutations.

But throughout that darkness, no magic, no malice, and no trap touched its three invaders. It was a Hell untenanted, save by the abominations that crept, preying stupidly upon one another, through its arched stone passageways. Level by level Antryg led them deeper into the surviving corner of Suraklin's mazes, and nowhere did they find anything but the long-spent memories of his evil and power. Even the ghosts, it seemed, had been calcined away by the wizards' wrath.

“I don't understand,” Joanna whispered.

They had come to the last, deepest chamber of all, a vast black cavern where a broken stone cover showed the inky waters of a stagnant well, and a round block of bluish stone, like an altar, crouched amid darkness that even Antryg's faint witchfire could not pierce. Beside her, Antryg stood, his full, oddly curving lips now tight and rather gray, as if the aura of the place, like a remembered smell, nauseated him. The blurred remains of a chalked circle were almost eradicated from the floor. Dark stains blotched the top of the altar block and tracked its sides. And that was all.

“This is it, isn't it?” Joanna asked softly.

Antryg nodded. Under a sudden sheen of sweat, all the muscles of his jaw rippled, like rope under strain, then eased again.

She looked hesitantly up at him, not liking the haunted horror in his eyes. “Do you—do you see something that I don't?”

“Only the past, my dear,” he murmured. “Only the past.” His breath blew out in a sigh; he turned to her, his eyes returning to the present once more. “Yes, this is where it should be, the centerpoint of Suraklin's power, the place where he—or I—performed his great magics.”

“You?”
The echoes of Caris' suspicious voice murmured back at them from the hard stone of the walls.

Antryg's eyes moved to the altar, then away. As if speaking of someone else, he said carefully, “You understand, there is a type of magic which can be drawn from certain—acts—which by then he was too old to perform himself.” He looked around him. “This was the place of his power, and I should say, my friends, that we have all been well and truly taken in.” At his small gesture, an explosion of light filled the room, bright and clear as a sodium lamp, digging like the eyes of God into every bleached, clean cranny of its hewn stone walls and flashing like diamonds in the obsidian waters of the pool. In all the space of that room there was nothing.

“But the abominations...” Caris began.

“They weren't guards,” the mad wizard said quietly. “Half of them were herbivores, by the look of their snouts—even that thing at the top went for the man nearest it, God help his wretched soul, rather than for us, who were nearer the stair. We're on a node in the lines. Every time the Void is opened, gaps in it open for a short distance all around it—but when it is opened on a line, the whole line faults. Those poor things are mere blunderers—through, harmless...”

“Harmless?”
echoed Caris indignantly.

“Comparatively harmless.”
The light around them faded again to the corpse-candle gleam above Antryg's head; he turned back to the stygian arch that led once more into the mazes and the hellish walk back to the outer air.

Caris strode after him. “Compared to what?”

Antryg shrugged. “Compared to what's going to happen when an intelligent one comes through.”

They did not speak again until they had emerged from the pits, by which time darkness had fallen once more outside. From the protection of the passage, Antryg listened, stretching his senses out into the Citadel around them. The Church's sasenna had retreated, watching from the hills around. No one, no matter what his mission, was prepared to linger in the Dark Mage's fortress after the fall of night. They found Peelbone's horse lying half in a gravel pit, with the hacked and burned remains of the thing that had killed it. There was blood everywhere, soaking into the frozen weeds, and wide-strewn rags of clothing saturated with blood, acid, and slime. Elsewhere Caris found part of Peelbone's hand, most of the flesh eaten from the melted bone. Antryg looked somberly at it, rubbing his broken fingers in their shabby gloves, but said nothing.

It was only when they were on the hills again, having slipped through the scattered guards, that Joanna asked, “If Suraklin's headquarters isn't at his Citadel, where is it?”

“Elsewhere.”
Antryg sighed, and hunched his shoulders against the cold night. The horses had, of course, been confiscated by the Witchfinders when they had first surrounded the Citadel, and it was a long and tiring trek over the dark hills to Larkmoor once again. “And unfortunately, since now he'll be well and truly alerted to the fact that I'm at large and looking for it, I haven't the remotest idea where.”

They left Larkmoor the following night, traveling north on foot.

It was a bad time of year to be taking to the roads, and Caris knew it, worriedly eyeing Joanna's small, spare form as she stumped along through the bitter darkness at Antryg's side; it would be worse still away from the main roads. The Sykerst was a land unkind to men.

Antryg's escape coupled with Peelbone's death had roused the countryside around Kymil and set patrols along the Angelshand road. But deeper in-country, Antryg argued, among the isolated villages that sprouted wherever there was soil enough to support thin crops of rye, they would stand a better chance of making their way northward in safety.

“There's another node, a crossing of the energy-lines, on Tilrattin Island about twenty-five miles upriver from Angelshand,” he had explained, when the four of them had sat around a picnic breakfast in the darkness of the deserted fodder barn at Larkmoor, following their return from the Citadel ruins. “Suraklin has to have established his computer at some node in the lines. That one has a lot to recommend it; it's on Prince Cerdic's land, for one thing...”

“And what do we do if it isn't Suraklin's headquarters, either?” Caris demanded, sitting in the mildewed straw at Pella's side, moodily stabbing his dagger into the floor. Reaction had set in on him. Having keyed himself for a death fight at the Citadel, he now felt empty, weary, and vaguely cheated. “Walk to the Citadel of Wizards in the taiga forests to check that one as well? And what if it isn't? What if it's somewhere on the other side of the world? Have you thought of that?”

“But we do know Suraklin's trying to take over control of the Empire,” Joanna pointed out diffidently. “So it's a good guess that's where it is.”

“I'm actually very taken with the notion of its being at the Citadel of Wizards,” Antryg mused with a dreamy grin. “It is the next nearest node in the Empire. Lady Rosamund would have a seizure from sheer indignation. But going there wouldn't be necessary.” He gestured with the muffin he was holding, his long legs folded tailor-wise under him and butter dripping on his gold-braided black cuffs. “By standing at a node in the lines when the computer comes up, I'll be able to feel the direction of the energy-flow and tell pretty well where it's going. I'd simply stay here eating your cook's excellent muffins, Pella, until I could do so from the Citadel node, only somehow I don't think that would be such a good idea.”