The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (26 page)

“I haven't the faintest idea,” he said, an expression of dazzled, scholarly delight in his face wholly at odds with the bruises and blood that marked it, the hell-pit darkness around them. “I'll need metal...”

“There's about fifty feet of copper wire in my backpack.”

He hesitated. “And I'll have to step out of the pentacle.” He had not taken his eyes from the thing before him; her shoulder to his side, Joanna could feel the swiftness of his breath.

She said seriously, “Not if you drew them real small.” For one second he glanced down at her, protesting, then realized she was joking and grinned. His hand was perfectly steady as he gave her the staff. Having seen him whip and twirl it like a cheerleader's baton, she was startled by its weight.

“Don't let it rush you head-on,” he cautioned softly. “It weighs three or four times what you do.”

“Do you want your sword back?”

He shook his head, dug a piece of chalk from the pocket of his coat, and gingerly stepped across the protective points of the magic circle. There was a flicker of blue light, like tiny discharges of electricity, among the pillars. Then silence again, that terrible waiting. Crouched like a lion gauging its moment to spring, the Dead God edged forward as Antryg knelt and began forming the complex shapes of the Sigils on the floor.

The torch was going; in the darkness Joanna thought she saw the lines on the floor begin to glow with a cold, frosty light, but it illuminated little save the mad wizard's long nose and cracked spectacles and the wet gleam of the Dead God's eyes. It was aware of her, she knew, watching with the mind that seemed to fill the icy blackness around her—as if it knew that it was she who held all the weapons, she who was totally unsuited to use them. Her hands shaking, she braced the staff under one arm and dug into her backpack, pulling out the copper wire and one of the several candles stowed in a side pocket, which she lit from the end of the dying torch. The light wasn't much, but she knew Antryg could see in the dark. She felt the Dead God's glance shift toward her and hastily set the candle down, praying she wouldn't be panicked into stepping on it, then gripped the staff once again.

There was no sound but the crumbling slur of chalk on stone, and the swift lightness of Antryg's breath.

Watching the pattern of the Sigils take shape, Joanna recognized some from Caris' practice drawings: the Sigil of the Gate; the Sigil of the Single Eye; the Sigil of Strength; and the horned Sigil of Shadows which governs veiled and hidden things. Linking through them was the Sigil of Roads, that curious, oddball Seal which, like the Lost God who governed it, had no power in itself at all. Across the protective points of the circle she tossed Antryg the copper wire and duct tape, knowing from Caris' explanations that metal was necessary in their workings; and still the Dead God edged forward, slime tracking down the broken ends of his bone fangs, his hands with their hooked nails stirring hungrily, uneasily, at the ends of rotting arms.

When Antryg straightened up his face seemed very white in the ghostly glow of the Sigils under the stitchwork of tracked blood. Around him the Seals of those ancient gods lay in a lace of light, wire, and duct tape, seeming to float on the stone. He took a deep breath, walked forward, and held out his hand to the Dead God.

With a gluey snarl, the Dead God raised two of its hands; Antryg saw what was coming and ducked, but not quickly enough. Claws raking, they caught him a stunning blow, flinging him against the closest pillar, as if he'd been in truth the scarecrow he so often resembled; then the Dead God was upon him.

Not knowing what else to do, knowing she could never cross the distance between them in time, Joanna swung the iron staff and caught the pillar behind her with a crack like a gunshot. The Dead God's head swiveled horribly on its neck, one eye glaring, the other drooping sickeningly as the muscles that held it began to come loose. Picking up one of Antryg's discarded pieces of chalk, she stooped and marked the floor:

     //////

                 //////

                 //

                 /////

                 //////

The Dead God stood for a long moment, staring down at the pattern of chalked lines. Then it turned to where Antryg still slumped at the base of the pillar. Closing one huge hand around his arm and another around the nape of his neck it hauled him to his feet. Their eyes held, the Dead God's glinting like a half-mad animal's, Antryg's calm and completely without fear. At length he took the rotting wristbones in his hands, and drew the thing toward the pattern of Sigils; it let him guide its hands to the points where metal and magic entwined, and left them there when Antryg rose and walked to the other end of the symbolic Road.

The wizard glanced down at Joanna's binary code. “What is it?”

“Planck's Constant.”

“I'm sure Mrs. Planck is pleased to hear it.” There was a note of strain in his voice, and she guessed by the way he moved that he'd cracked a rib against the pillar.

“If he's a scientist he'll recognize it. It's the ratio of energy to frequency of light and it occurs over and over again in physics. Like pi, it was a way to tell him that we knew he isn't the Dead God. That we knew who he is really.”

Antryg knelt down near the Sigil of Shadow and touched the glowing latticework of wire and light. “Perhaps he needed reminding himself,” he said softly and wiped the trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. Joanna set down the staff and, shivering slightly, stepped across the psionic barrier of the pentacle to kneel at Antryg's side.

“I think you're going to need a technical consultant.”

Behind the blood-flecked glass, she saw the quick flare of concern in his eyes, but he couldn't deny the truth of what she said. After a hesitation, he took her hands, his long fingers and the leather of his gloves sticky with the gross corruption of the monster's touch, and guided them to the wan stringers of criss-crossing light. “I don't know how much you'll be able to hear,” he cautioned softly. “If you feel him trying to get a grip on your mind, pull out at once. Don't try to help me. All right?”

Joanna nodded uneasily.

“Good girl.” He drew a deep breath and flinched at the stab of his injured ribs, then seemed to settle in on himself, half closing his eyes, not working magic, Joanna thought, but drinking of the magic of the Sigils themselves.

Not being mageborn, she felt very little, only a kind of warmth where the light lay under her fingers. For a time she heard nothing; but glancing up in the dim amber reflection of the distant candle, she saw Antryg's lips move and realized that her own nervous observation of the Dead God in the darkness that surrounded them was blocking her concentration.

Great,
she thought bitterly. What a time to have to pick up meditation techniques. But she had read enough to have some idea of what she must do. Perhaps the hardest thing was simply to close her eyes, to release all thought, all fear, and all planning of what she'd do if... to think of nothing...

Like the distant murmur of a metallic wind, she heard the Dead God's voice.

“. . . The more lives I take, the greater my power will grow. I can drink the magic of your brain, Windrose—magic to keep this flesh from corrupting, magic to take, to hold. Why should I return to my own world, when with the powers of a god I can spread my will across the earth here?”

“I suppose you can.” Antryg's voice seemed distant in the darkness, but perfectly conversational, no more ill-at-ease than if they shared a tankard of beer at some alehouse hearth. “Provided, that is, you're more than semiconscious and still able to take care of yourself. But I don't think you will be. Human psychic energy is really a rather poor substitute for what you eat in your own world, isn't it? Not to mention the air.”

“This flesh tolerates the air.”

“You're poisoning yourself and you know it—or you did know it when you tried to cut back on human sacrifices and when you tried all those other things—beef blood or walking out to the Witchpath Stone on the nights the energy ran along it.”

Joanna felt, through the whispering whiteness of the Sigils' light, the bloody stir of the Dead God's anger. “The hunger grows,” it whispered.

Diffidently, she put in, “That's common with food allergies.”

“In my own world I was nothing,” the god whispered. “A technician, a tracker of xchi particles for other men's research. Here, I have power.”

“Only as long as you retain your consciousness,” Antryg pointed out. “My magic will give you, more power, yes. But it won't stop the clouding of your mind. At best, you'll become a random force, a psychic whirlwind that grows with every human mind it devours until someone finally finds a way to destroy you as mad dogs are destroyed. At worst, you'll be controlled by others, as Pettin controls you now. I don't see another choice for you.”

There was a rush, a surge, a blaze of light behind her eyes and half-drunken fury and hate slamming like a wave against her mind. Joanna jerked her hands free of Antryg's light touch and opened her eyes in time to see the wizard flinch aside with a cry. Though the Dead God had not moved, Joanna saw the fresh claw marks that scored Antryg's face and jaw, running with blood; as she watched, a second set gouged his neck; the air rumbled with a sound of rage that seemed to come from nowhere, the foggy rage of the Dead God's half-polluted brain. Antryg bent under the blows, blood streaming from his face and neck, but never took his hands from the curving horns of the Sigil of Shadow.

The angry rumbling died.

Her heart hammering, Joanna could not bring herself to touch the Sigils again, but in time she heard Antryg whisper, “Where is the body that you came here in from your own world?”

The Dead God must have made some reply, for after a time the wizard breathed, “Since it has not corrupted in this world, were I to guide you back into it and back through the Void to a place where you could get help, would they be able to save you?”

An even longer silence followed; then Antryg, still half in his trance, smiled. “Yes,” he murmured, like a distant echo of his conversations with Caris. “Mad, too. You no more know that I won't destroy you when you open your mind to me than I know that when I open mine to you, you won't simply devour it. Do you believe that you need my help?”

If he was sane he might,
Joanna thought desperately. If he wasn't fogged-out, half-poisoned with the psychic and metabolic garbage he's been ingesting for weeks... Don't do it, Antryg. Don't give him what he seeks...

But Antryg took his hands from the Sigils, and climbed slowly, wincingly to his feet. The Dead God loomed over him in the shadows and held out two rotting hands to help him up; together the gawky wizard and the monster vanished into the black hole of the haunted darkness. The glow of light in the Sigils themselves faded, seeming to sink into the floor, leaving only a smudgy tracing of chalk and the tangled snakes of copper wire, glinting faintly in the flicker of the single candle at Joanna's side.

How long she sat alone in the darkness, Joanna wasn't sure afterward, her every nerve strained, listening for sounds in the utter silence of the distant crypt. The candle burned itself slowly down. Reaction was setting in, after a day's exhausting walk and only hours of sleep snatched at intervals in the endless childbirth of the squire's lady the night before. Weirdly enough, the blood that had rained down during the combat with the Dead God had vanished without a trace, though Joanna was at a loss to say when. She wondered whether it had, in fact, ever existed.

Antryg was alone in the crypt with the Dead God. That he had said nothing to her at their departure didn't surprise her; she suspected that he was channeling all his strength into maintaining some kind of psychic link with the Dead God's mind, some lifeline to that lost abomination's sanity that he dared not loose. The cold deepened. Joanna huddled into her sheepskin coat, watching the mist of her breath, gilded by the dim candle-gleam, and wondering how long she should give it.

Before doing what?

The great doors were bolted from the outside. In her heart she knew she'd wait a long time before she dared make her way through the sightless forest of the pillared vestibule down to those ghastly vaults alone.

The noise, when it came, nearly made her jump out of her skin with shock—the slamming scrape of the door bolts at her back, and a man's angry curse. Then the night air touched her face, close to freezing but almost warm compared to the icy stillness around her.

“Joanna?”

Torchlight fell across the floor over her in a gold bar, sparkling on Caris' blond hair and the blade of his drawn sword. He fell back with a gasp from the threshold. “What the...”

“Here!” She sprang to her feet and stumbled to him, her knees almost giving way with the cramp of long sitting; she was shaking all over as he caught her briefly in the circle of his arm. He wore his sword sash and dagger belt strapped over his scholar's robe; past his shoulder Joanna saw no one in the trough of darkness between church and baptistry save one man slumped unconscious at the bottom of the steps and the arm of another projecting from the shadows of the baptistry door. “Caris, we...”

“Where is he?” The young man held the torch aloft, looking swiftly around the vestibule, concern overriding for a moment both his nausea and his usual shield of aloof and bitter calm. “Is he... ?”

“He went down to the crypt with the Dead God,” she said. “He was going to try to send the Dead God back, he said... Caris. You do care for him, don't you?” For the fear in his face was unmistakable and had little to do with being left to deal with Suraklin alone.

“He's the most maddening mooncalf I've ever had the misfortune to know,” Caris retorted explosively, not answering the question. “If he's...”

He broke off and caught her arm. Around them the freezing darkness seemed shaken suddenly, like a curtain in a wind. Cold terror skated across Joanna's bones and she clutched tight to the coarse wool of Caris' sleeve. For an instant, the universe seemed to ripple into breathing nearness around them.