The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (34 page)

Since he had first met Antryg, when he was a child of six, and later, when he had encountered the genial madman chatting of tortoise-shell rubbings and playing cat's cradle in the Silent Tower, he had known by reputation alone that he was a wizard. Though he had learned magic from him, he had never seen him display power of any kind, save in little things that he himself could do. Insensibly, he had come to think of him chiefly as a scatterbrained and devious lunatic, his maddening mentor, Joanna's lover, cheerfully pursuing a quixotic quest from which he could not hope to emerge alive.

He had almost forgotten that this man had been Suraklin's chosen student.

He remembered it now, as Antryg raised his hand, the spark still flickering, an inch and a half of baby lightning between thumb and finger.

Uncertain, the advancing sasenna slowed their rush. The wind caught Antryg's cloak and coat skirts in a batwing swirl, edged in that crackling glow. Caris, seeing that drawn face, the serene mouth, and the pain-filled, grief-haunted eyes, understood—it was a face of unhuman power, the most powerful wizard in the world, Salteris—Suraklin—had said, including myself...

A voice screamed, “Kill them!” and the ring closed.

Antryg's arm lashed down. As if he had a whip in his hand the lightning elongated, shattering out from his twisted fingers to smite the earth at his feet and show his face like a demented god's in the streaming mane of his gray hair. From the ground, the lightning sprang upward, vicious, living, swelling to a whirlwind in which Caris could see eyes, teeth, whips, claws, too bright to look upon in the exploding darkness. In a column of blinding fire it leaped from earth to sky, the sasenna still rushing toward them, as it was the Way of Sasenna to do, unflinching...

Whatever had taken shape within the lightning fell upon them, and the screaming began.

Blinded, shaken, shattered, Caris was aware of nothing else until a hand like an iron claw shut around his arm and he was nearly dragged off his feet by strength he never knew Antryg had. The wizard held Joanna by the other arm, dragging them both at a run within yards of the howling electric maelstrom, through the break in the lines of the sasenna it had caused, and across the huge darkness of the gardens, while the shrieks and cries behind them ripsawed the night. As he ran, Caris caught a glimpse of Antryg's face and saw it was like cut bone, a dead man's face; in his gray eyes was a terrible darkness over half a lifetime deep.

No one pursued them through the woods.

The ford was frozen, the river stilled. Snow lay thinly everywhere on the island, save upon the circle itself; their feet slipped in it as they climbed the graveled slope of the riverbank. Antryg stumbled as they reached the circle, as if all the strength had gone out of him, and leaned against the bluish granite of the outer ring, his face as gray as the stone. He whispered, “They never had a chance.”

“Neither had we,” Caris gritted through his teeth.

The wizard pressed his gloved hands together against his face, as if by doing so he could still their shaking; a spasm of shuddering wracked him, bowing his whole body. Behind the broken fingers Caris saw the hard glitter of tears.

More gently, he said, “It was them or us.”

Antryg nodded, but his wretched sobbing did not cease. He had sinned, Caris knew, in the true sense of the word. Whether it had been necessary or not to protect them long enough to encompass Suraklin's defeat, the fact remained that he had turned his magic upon those unable to defend against it.

“An elemental?”
Joanna asked softly, and Caris glanced back at her.

“How did you know?”

“They say Suraklin used to call them. I think he called one to destroy Narwahl Skipfrag, when Skipfrag caught him trying to remove his electrical experiments from his laboratory. From the look of it he used broken glass to clothe it, to make its substance.”

Leaning against the stone, Antryg nodded and raised his head as if against the weight of some terrible yoke. “He could use anything,” he murmured. “It was the only thing that would—would remain when we had left the area and that Magus couldn't brush aside.” His breath blew from his lips in pale steam in the cold traces of glimmering moonlight that were able to pierce the clouds; he had taken off his spectacles. Tear tracks shone on his ravaged face. “They had no magic—most of them probably didn't even believe in it.” He was shaking as if naked in a place of bitterest cold.

“You can't think about that,” Caris said quietly.

Antryg shook his head, agreeing without the horror or the grief in his eyes abating one degree.

Joanna said softly, “They'll be coming after you now, won't they? The Council can find you...”

“Hence the circle.”
The wizard raised his head again and, with trembling fingers, pushed back the hair from his face. He looked spent, more weary than Caris had seen him except perhaps in the Tower after they'd put the Sigil of Darkness on him, all the colored fires of his absurd courage burned to ash by what he had done. “The other mages will guess I've used the wizard's path, but it will take them a while to guess where I've gone, and longer to follow. It's only a matter of time now, but then it has always been.” He moved his shoulders against the cold slab, pushing himself to a standing position once again, his whole body moving slowly, achingly, like an old man's.

“Antryg, listen,” Caris said quietly. “You and Joanna have to go to Suraklin's headquarters, wherever it is. I understand that—especially now, while he's in Kymil with Leynart. But Kymil is where I have to go. If what you say about the smallpox-rose is true, I have to stop Leynart before he delivers it. Does one have to be a mage to use the path? Would I have the power...”

“No,” Antryg said simply. “But it doesn't matter. While the computer was up, Joanna and I came here to the circle and took a bearing along the line. The energy is flowing back to Kymil.”

Caris stared at him, digesting this information, the implications sinking in... “But we went all through Suraklin's Citadel,” he protested. “We looked—you looked. That's impossible.”

“I know.” Antryg replaced his spectacles on his nose, gingerly avoiding the healing wounds of the Dead God's claws. The ghost of his old lunatic grin brushed his lips. “But that's never prevented me from doing things before. Now come—it's growing late.”

The strangest thing about traveling the witchpath was that there seemed to be nothing strange about it. Though intensely cold, the night was clear. Only a layer of ground fog clung like white smoke about the feet of the menhirs as Antryg led his two companions across the circle and under one of the great trilithons, and Joanna, clinging apprehensively to Antryg's hand, shivered and looked around her, waiting for the magic to begin.

Only it did not begin. Antryg simply walked, holding her by the hand and Caris by the arm, along the aisle of broken menhirs. Beyond in the darkness Joanna could see the dark shapes of trees and the occasional patches of snow shining faintly through the gloom. A scrim of light clung like a thin frost about some of the stones nearest them; that was all. She wondered if Antryg would be able to overcome his revulsion at what he had done enough to work the magic that would carry them south. But looking up at him, she dared not speak. His face was set and very tired, his eyes seeming to look inward on some pit of haunted memory. The shimmer of the stones caught like starfire in his earrings, on the gimcrack tangle of his beads, and on the tears that still marked his face.

Give him time,
she thought, wondering apprehensively how much time they had. Give him time.

It was only when they had been walking for twenty-five minutes by Joanna's digital watch and had still not reached the river—at best a hundred feet from the edge of the circle—that she understood. They were on the path already. The magic breathed so softly from the menhirs that neither she nor Caris could detect it. Only Antryg, walking silent between them, knew it was there.

“Can all wizards do this?” Caris asked quietly, and Antryg, at the request for specific information, seemed to rouse himself a little from the dreadful isolation in which he was trapped. “Or could they once?”

“Not all, no.” The mage pushed up his spectacles to rub the smudgy circles weariness had painted beneath his eyes. “How to use them for travel was never knowledge held by more than a few, even in the old days before the Battle of Stellith. How they work, what they are, why journeys along them always take the length of the night, provided they are begun before midnight, why one doesn't sleep on the path, and can't do so, in fact, and why at certain seasons of the year they must not be traveled at all...”

“There are legends, stories, conflicting accounts. I—I sense things about them, as I sense things about the Void, that I can't put into words. But I have no proof.”

Joanna looked out beyond the line of light-edged monoliths and wondered where she would find herself if she stepped through one of those weedy gaps. She had, however, no intention of trying. Though the stones leaned tiredly, weatherworn and obviously ruinously old, nowhere did the lines gap, as she remembered them doing in the fields south of Devilsgate. She knew the lines did not run continuously clear to Kymil. Yet from the inside, the track was unbroken. Each stone along the way was individual, shaped and weathered to its own personality; each was cold and damp when she touched it, hard and real under her hand. Weeds grew thickly around them, stiff with frost. They bent and crackled under the brush of Antryg's heavy cape hem, and now and then Joanna could see in the frosted mud of the track other footprints, running on south ahead of them—the footprints of the Dark Mage.

They rested several times during the night, Joanna glad to be relieved of the weight of her backpack. By this time she had become inured to walking, though the cold troubled her; under her thick sheepskin coat, the velvet uniform of Cerdic's page was less warm than her coarse laborer's clothes had been. She felt shaken and depressed, the sight of Surak lin's footprints—Gary's footprints—disconcerting her unexpectedly, reminding her that soon they would meet. She tried not to think about that, about the possibility of defeat and enslavement, or about the possibility of her own death. Throughout the last few weeks, even trapped in the stinking Erebus of the Dead God's church, she had taken comfort in Antryg's presence. He had seldom used his power; but unlike Caris, she had always been conscious of its possibility and in her heart had never really believed in his defeat.

But though gradually the desperate tension of self-hate eased out of his body, she was conscious, through his gloved hand in hers, of his utter weariness. The power he had used to summon the elemental and to clothe it in lightning had left him spent and ill. Not knowing what to say, she only walked close to him, under the vast purple blanket of his cloak, her arm around his waist. After a moment, like a man seeking warmth, his arm tightened around her shoulders.

Freezing cold and nearly as black as the night they had just left, dawn found the three travelers at the nadir of the gaping pit that had been Suraklin's Citadel. Throughout the night Joanna had been prey to fears of what awaited them at the end of the witchpath, entertaining in her mind half a dozen hideous and mutually exclusive scenarios, from entrapment within the Citadel to cosmic rerouting to some distant point.

But when the mists faded around them as they stepped through the gap between the last two menhirs of the line, Joanna saw only the barren sides of the pit funneling up around her, calcined, charred in places, dangling with stiff black stringers of cold-killed vines. Above the vast circle of the pit's lips, the sky was the blackish yellow of an old bruise.

The air smelled of snow and of the sickening carrion whiff from the rotting doorways all about the pit's sides. On the ground high above, the wind screamed over the stones. Even down here in relative shelter, it riffled the lead-colored waters of a vast pool of seepage that lay before their feet.

Antryg looked around him, exhausted and baffled, his tangled gray curls shifted by that cutting wind. “It has to be here,” he said softly. “Somewhere—hidden so deep Suraklin wouldn't even need to guard the place for fear of drawing attention to it. It has to.”

“We've been through every pit, every vault, every passage of the few that are left,” Caris said, his voice quiet but hard as chipped flint, “and we have proven to ourselves that it isn't. If he makes anything like the same time we did, Pharos should be at Larkmoor tonight. Whether you go there or not, Antryg, I'm going to be there to intercept Leynart before he uses that charm of his to trigger a plague.”

“Do that.” Behind his spectacles, Antryg's eyes seemed to have darkened to smoke color with tiredness, but they studied the young warrior evenly, as if he, like Joanna, realized that, given a choice, Caris placed saving Pella's life above what might be his only chance for revenge upon             the man who had murdered his grandfather. But neither commented on the final breaking of his obsession. There was a brittle, desperate quality about the young man now, like a sword blade bent to the snapping point.

Deep and soft as silk velvet, Antryg continued, “Joanna and I will stay here, search once again—there has to be something I've overlooked. If we find nothing...” He hesitated, absently rubbing his crooked hands, then went on, his tone carefully neutral, “. . . if nothing finds us, we'll sleep the night at the Silent Tower. In the weeks past, I've scried the place by magic. Since my escape, it's been abandoned. If you don't come I'll scry for you...” He paused again, as if his mind stumbled over the promise of that casual use of little magic, the muscles in his lean jaw jumping, as if he had carelessly brushed a raw wound. Then he took a deep breath and forced himself to go on. “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” Caris said quietly. He stood for a time longer, studying his sometime teacher. Joanna could see the hardness of his dark soul armor, an almost visible aura about that muscular, black-clothed form, but his eyes were not the eyes of the young man who had begun the journey north. He had made his choice, whether he articulated it to himself yet or not, that the saving of lives was preferable to the taking of them. “Go carefully, Antryg.” His glance moved to Joanna, and he said, “Take care of him,” and was rewarded with the ghost of her grin.