The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (39 page)

She never knew what he shouted at her. Her name, she thought, and some other word, a spell-word that sliced through the calm fog in her mind like thrown ice water. At the same moment, she felt the burning scorch of fire on her hair, her back, and her arms. He stumbled to his feet, caught her, and held her, smothering the heat between her skin and her coat, pressing her to him, heedless of the gun wedged between their bodies.

After a moment the heat faded again. She brought up her hand from his side and saw her fingers covered in blood.

She began to shake uncontrollably. “Antryg, I'm sorry,” she sobbed. “I'm sorry—it was a spell—Suraklin's spell—”

“Don't!” he whispered desperately. His breath came as if he fought for every lungful, his face chalk-white with shock and strain. “Don't say anything. I understand. Put the Sigil in place and let's get out of here. Someone's coming; he's summoned help, and we have to stop them before they get here...”

“Who...” she began dazedly.

“Never mind that!”
Behind his specs, his eyes were frantic.

Her hands shaking, Joanna tore open the velcro pocket of her backpack, fumbled with the lead shielding in which the Sigil was wrapped. She felt an increasing reluctance to touch the central teles under which she knew she must place it, a distaste for the whole project—she would be killing the last vestiges of Suraklin, Salteris, the Regent's father, Gary... It was murder...

So was your trying to shoot Antryg,
she reminded herself disgustedly. And Caris, dying up at the top of the cliff... Antryg made a swift gesture toward her, swiftly repressed; looking up she saw the strain on his face and the sweat tracking down through the grime and blood, and realized that in his mind, too, Suraklin was whispering.

Her fingers shrinking from the task, she swiftly pushed the teles aside in its copper bed and slid the Sigil of Darkness into place.

The breaking of the energy drain was like the snapping of a metal band encircling her brain. She felt almost shocked, once more aware of the bone-numbing cold, of the danger in which they stood, and the smell of gunpowder and of Antryg's blood. The bluish gleam of the teles-balls died, and the scribbled light of the runes on the floor faded. Only the red and green lights of the Cray gleamed, baleful stars in the darkness, picking out Antryg's nose and lips and spectacles and winking in the haphazard collection of tuppenny beads and Imperial jewels around his neck. The drone of the UPS kicking in filled the black emptiness around them, broken by the shrill hooting of the alarm. At the same time, she felt the power all around her grow; the crackle of inchoate hatred in the darkness was held at bay only by Antryg's failing spells. Heat seemed to whisper, inches from her flesh.

“How long?” he breathed as they stumbled through the darkness, back toward the beckoning glimmer of his mark.

She shook her head. “A battery that size can keep a computer going for about a day.” She felt him shiver and knew he'd never hold out that long. “But he'll be drawing energy from it for his spells to keep the enclave open for his repair crew, whoever they are, to get in—and to destroy you.”

Antryg managed a crooked grin. “Added incentive for my death, I see.” He was leaning on her, the sleeve of his coat warm and scratchy on her frozen face, permeated with the smells of sulfur and blood. Joanna realized Suraklin would never have needed an added incentive—Antryg was the only wizard who would have been able to hold out this long against the defense-spells. No wonder Suraklin had tried at every opportunity to have him killed.

“I don't know how much that takes, but I'd guess an awful lot.” She cocked an ear back, listening to the alarm hooters. Was it her imagination, she wondered, or were they more frequent than before? “With all the spare battery packs disconnected—maybe an hour?”

He shuddered again at the endless length of time. “Unless he can break me first.”

The inner chamber of the Citadel, beyond the Gate of the enclave, was crawling with abominations. Pausing on the insubstantial threshold above the pool, Joanna heard them and smelled them in the foul darkness, and all her innards seemed to contract with dread. She whispered queasily, “Can you summon light?”

Antryg shook his head. “Not now,” he breathed. “Joanna, I can't. He's in my mind, tearing at it with his spells...”

“Okay. Don't worry about it.” She unslung the backpack from her shoulder and found her flashlight. Its feeble beam glanced off the obsidian waters beneath their feet and caught the glitter of slime, the flash of mismated eyes. The beam shook as it traveled over them: fat things like monster slugs with foul, dripping snouts; something like a daddy longlegs skittering nervously near the wall; bloated, mutant rats; and things that must once have been cockroaches before some effect of the Void had changed them. She clenched her teeth hard, trying not to make a noise.

Beyond them, the door into the sightless mazes of the vaults stood open, and she could sense movement in the darkness beyond.

“We've got to close it,” Antryg whispered desperately. “Block it, barricade it...”

Behind them, the grating rumble of the backup battery echoed like a bass thunder; the alarms were hooting faster. If nothing else, thought Joanna, they had to get out of the gateway before it collapsed...

“Here goes nothing.” She pulled open her backpack, removed the first of the DARKMAGE files, and wadded the photocopied pages into a ball. Thank God, she thought obliquely, I brought lots of matches... The abominations shrank back from the fire when she tossed it among them. She lit five more crumpled balls and flung them, some to one side, some to the other.

“Screw the sheets into torches.” Antryg was already doing so as he spoke. “If we can make it to the door...”

“We really have to bar it with us on this side of it?”

“Believe me, Joanna,” he said softly, “I guarantee you it's preferable.”

She didn't believe him until they reached the door—ancient, dusty, thick wood strapped and reinforced with iron on the inside and sheeted with copper on the outside. It was hung perfectly on steel hinges and it would swing with a touch. For a moment Joanna stood in the black arch, listening, and heard the footsteps in the passage beyond. They were slow and dragging; once she heard the thud of a body falling against a wall, and the clash of a dropped weapon, then a scrabbling noise as it picked itself up again.

She looked up at the tall wizard beside her, her revulsion stark upon her face.

“Bolt it,” said Antryg softly. “Suraklin's magic will still be in his flesh.”

Behind them, the abominations closed in. Joanna formed a barrier of wadded paper, crumpling and lighting all the DARKMAGE files, the pounds of paper she'd lugged on her back for hundreds of miles, the last details of the lives of two wizards, an Imperial Prince, and a computer programmer—the final records of their existence. From the enclave gate, still hanging, glimmering, above the pool, the tempo of the alarms had increased, shrieking, desperate, calling help, blocked on the very edge of immortality. All through the horrible shadows of the room the abominations stirred, prowling back and forth, the rats' eyes gleaming, outsize chisel teeth bared. Listening behind her, Joanna imagined she could hear the approaching footfalls in the hall, stumbling, slurring. Leaning against the door beside her, Antryg looked gray and drawn, his eyes shut, reaming the last strength, the last magic, from the marrow of his bones.

The blow on the door, when it came, seemed to shake the very stone from which the vaults were cut. Antryg flinched, but turned a little, to press his face and hands to the iron-bound wood, his eyes shut and his face twisted with pain. Joanna heard a sharp hissing behind her, smelled damp smoke, and swung around to see a trickle of water from the pool snaking toward the flickering line of her barrier blazes. That was impossible, she thought, terrified, as the abominations moved forward with the lessening of the fire—the floor sloped up...

She pulled more paper from her backpack, twisted it into another torch and lit it. Gritting her teeth, she strode toward the slobbering, pulsing things on the other side of the light, lashing at them with the torch.

The water was indeed seeping up from the pool. Wider, thicker streams of it, like black slime, flowed up the slope of the floor toward their feet, dousing another one of her little fires. Another blow fell on the door, and she saw, close to Antryg's head, the solid oak timbers heave and crack. Antryg himself seemed hardly to notice; he appeared to be almost in a trance, except for the gasping of his breath and the desperate contortion of his face. Grimly, Joanna stuck the torch into a crack in the wall and twisted another one, then caught at the first as it fell—she could have sworn it had been firmly wedged. With quick-blazing fire in each hand, she swung at the abominations. One of the rats, the size of a dog and grossly fat, hissed at her; for a hideous second, she thought it would leap, but it backed away, its twisted face a nightmare.

Another blow drove a shard of the copper sheathing through the door and made the strapping jerk and pull in the wood. It was Gary out there, Joanna thought as she swung again at a tentacled thing like a groping black wart that edged toward them. Gary with the top of his head blown off, Gary with his nose a bloody mash, Gary with nothing in his eyes but Suraklin's will...

Antryg made a small sound of pain. At the same instant, Joanna herself felt a stab of sickness, deep in her guts, the burning wrench like poisoned heat. From the enclave, the alarms were screaming, thick and fast now, louder and louder, like a heartbeat skipping out of its rhythm, spiraling up into the danger zone. Blackness swam in front of her eyes, and pain and nausea twisted at her guts as she pulled another handful of paper out, lit it with shaking hands from the last, and swung it at the things that waited greedily in the ankle-deep waters of the flooded floor.

The pounding on the door seemed eerily to pick up the tempo of the alarms, faster, more urgent, more desperate. Antryg cried out again, blood tracking down from the corner of his mouth as his counterspells began to crack under the inexorable pressure of the computer's strength. The alarms scaled up, blending into a single, screaming note. Beneath the screaming, Joanna could hear voices, like the wicker of colorless flame. Some of them were thin, unformed whispers of minds that had never been human; others were terrifyingly familiar...

Babe, you're coming out to my place this weekend, aren't you? I've got four new games for the computer, some good beer... new jet system for the Jacuzzi...

You must do as you think best, my son, but I think you would be a better healer than a fighter...

My father won't hear of it, but if you say Suraklin really is a danger, my lord Archmage, then I am behind you with all the support I can raise...

And far back of them all, half obliterated by those random snatches of memory, an old man's voice, high and harsh and terrible, whispered, You
were my only love... my only love. Of course I can still love... I can still feel... I can still taste the wine of life... It's all in the programs and will be forever. I still live...

The silence falling was like a blow over the head with a club. For an instant Joanna wondered, What now? and turned to look back toward the shimmering gate of the enclave and the distant glitter of the red computer lights that were like evil stars in some impossible darkness. But the lights were gone. With a tired gurgle, the water around her feet had already begun to slither away toward the well again; the abominations, sniffing and hissing, backed further from the crude bundles of burning paper still in her hands. A moment later, like smoke dispersing, the dark gate faded away.

Antryg's voice was no more than a thread. “Entropy always wins,” he murmured. With hands that would barely close, he shoved back the door bolts. Neither of them looked at what lay across the threshold as they began their stumbling ascent once more to the light.

They found Caris lying where he had fallen, twenty feet or so from the lip of the chasm, a broken black shape in a pool of blood. Joanna knelt beside him and felt his face and his remaining hand, searching against hope for some sign of life. She had thought all emotion wrung out of her by the ordeal in the vaults, but now realized that that had only been the result of the energy drain. Now tears collected in her eyes—for Caris and for the fact that she had left him to die without a backward glance.

It had, of course, been what he would have done—what it was the Way of the Sasenna to do.

The short winter day had passed noon. The sky was a low sheet of steel-colored billows, like the undersurface of murky water; the air smelled of snow.

She heard the crunch of Antryg's boots on the hard frost behind her. Glancing up, she saw he'd retrieved his cloak from the subsidence where she'd rolled wearing it. In the daylight he looked ghastly, his haggard face tracked with runnels of blood through the sweat-matted dust, and spreading stains of it dark on his left sleeve and side. He moved stiffly, slowly, like an old man. His crooked hands shook as he covered Caris with the cloak.

“We'll have to get word to Pella,” Joanna said dully.

“I'm sure the wizards will do that.” Antryg knelt beside her and pushed back the short-cropped fair hair from the young man's still face. “They'll be here very soon now.”

The thought of the effort flight would entail turned her stomach, but she said, “We'd better go.” She started to get to her feet, then gasped with startled pain. Under her coat and jacket, half her back was burned and beginning to throb. She gritted her teeth, fighting the tears and the wave of faintness that came over her at the pain. It was nothing, she knew, to what Antryg was going through or to what Caris must have gone through, raising himself for that final shot. “We've got a lead on them—with any luck they'll think you and Suraklin destroyed each other...”

Something changed in the air, some shock-blast-impact—as if the reverse side of the universe had been kicked by a giant foot. The air as well as the ground seemed to shudder with a noise that Joanna was not entirely certain was not solely in her own skull, the crying of voices in a dream. She caught Antryg's shoulder in fear. Dust rose in a white column from the abyss that had been the Citadel vaults, slowly mushrooming into the freezing air, then slowly dispersing.