The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (40 page)

“The enclave,” Antryg said softly. In the ashy daylight, his face looked as deathly as that of the boy at whose side he still knelt. “He's used the last of whatever power was left to him to implode it completely—to destroy himself. So he did remember, after all.”

Through the pain in her back and her grief over Caris, it was hard to think, but Joanna said, “Remember what?”

“Why he wanted to live forever.” Tears made a shining track through the grime on either side of his beaky nose. “The operative word in that phrase is not 'forever,' but 'live.' And living is not only listening to songs, but singing them; not only possessing the wine in bottles, but tasting it in the company of those you love. Part of the beauty of a sunset is the way its colors change and intensify as it fades to night. Maybe he did realize at last that he was only the copy of a copy, a series of subroutines condemned to an eternity of Read Only...” He sighed and pushed up his specs to wipe his eyes with the back of his glove. “Or maybe, like me, he simply couldn't abide the thought of being locked up once again.”

She looked down at his face, half hidden by his hair, and the grief that haunted his gray eyes. “You still loved him, didn't you?”

A smile flicked at the corners of his mouth. “Oh, not actively anymore. But I, too, remember.” He sighed and stopped himself sharply, pressing his hand to his side where her bullet had grazed.

Gently he raised Caris' right arm, the burnt chunk of the gun-butt dropping from the two remaining fingers. Blood oozed stickily from the wound.

Through a blur of exhausted tears, Joanna scanned the barren hills. The iron-colored earth was streaked with snow beneath a leaden sky. Cold wind stirred the singed ends of her hair. Though the landscape was utterly desolate, she had the uneasy feeling of being watched. She said, “We'd better go. The wizards will be here soon.”

“I know.” He folded Caris' hands on the young man's breast, and laid his own on top of them, the long, crooked fingers stained with blood. “I can feel them seeking me with their minds, seeking my magic. But here at the node of the lines, there is one more magic that it's possible for me to perform.” He sat for a moment, gathering the remains of his concentration and his exhausted powers through the staggering weight of pain and weariness. Joanna did not understand what he meant, until his eyes slipped shut and his head bowed, and she realized he had gone into a healing trance.

She stood for a long time at his side, her throat hurting, half-sick with her own pain and exhaustion. Then slowly, painfully, she sat down again on the gray earth. Despite the thick sheepskin of her coat, the quilted velvet page's jacket, and the lace-trimmed shirt beneath, she felt cold to the marrow of her bones. Tears burning at her eyes, she leaned her head against Antryg's shoulder and tucked her chilled fingers for warmth around his arm. The wind spat snow at them from the surrounding hills and groaned among the charred bones of the Citadel all around.

After nearly an hour of silence, Joanna saw Caris' eyelids move, his ribcage rise, sink, and, after a long moment, rise again.

After two hours, with the darkness beginning to thicken in the louring sky, she was wakened from a half doze of sheer weariness by the strike of hooves on stone. She raised her head to see the ring of mounted sasenna who surrounded them, halberds and spears glittering like metal teeth in the failing light. Half a dozen horses stood apart in a group, the black robes of their riders whirling like storm-clouds in the sleety wind. At their head sat Lady Rosamund, her face like stone and her green eyes pitiless as jade.

“It's odd, you know,” Antryg said quietly, steam blurring his spectacles as he poured bubbling water from the kettle into a cracked earthenware teapot. “The two places I've lived longest in my life—really the only two places where I've stayed long enough to qualify as 'home'—have been Suraklin's Citadel and here in the Silent Tower. Would you care for some tea?” he inquired of the pair of red-robed Church wizards who sat stiffly watching him by the door. Both of them glared and the older of the two, a woman, made the sign against evil.

Antryg sighed, wincing a little at the pinch in his cracked rib, and replaced the kettle on the narrow hearth. He handed Joanna a cup of tea with a rueful smile. “In any case, they can't put the Sigil of Darkness back on me.” He rubbed absently at the brown mark on his throat. “Have you heard how Caris is?”

Joanna shook her head. The sheer mass and darkness of the Silent Tower oppressed her. Curiously, though the wizards, both Church and Council, who kept guard over her solitary cell on the lower level of the Tower, treated her far better than the Witchfinders had when she had been their prisoner, she found herself far more frightened. Perhaps this was because, when she had been a prisoner of the Witchfinders, she had known Antryg, and Caris, and Magister Magus, were still free and capable of helping her escape, as indeed they had done. She was now without options.

Then, too, she thought, watching Antryg's tall shadow move across the smoke-stained granite of the ceiling vaults, her sense of utter hopelessness might simply stem from exhaustion, the physical reaction to pain and overexertion, and to the repeated emotional shocks of the previous day. Upon being locked into her cell in the Tower, she had fallen almost immediately asleep, in spite of her wretched conviction that Antryg might very well be dead by the time she woke up. Looking at the weariness that seemed to have ground its way indelibly into the deep lines of his face, she wondered if he had done the same.

“I know he's at Larkmoor,” she said in a small voice. “And that they say he'll live.”

He took the battered and mended chair at her side, and his long, swollen jointed fingers automatically sought hers. The room in which the Council had imprisoned him was his old study, crammed with his books, his astronomical instruments, and his mechanical toys. In shadow at the far end, Joanna glimpsed a narrow cot, heaped with a haphazard collection of furs and faded quilts. It did not look as if it had been slept on.

“He'll live,” Antryg repeated softly and sighed again. “Now I wonder why they said that?”

“Because there are certain members of the Council who insisted upon it.”

Both of them looked up quickly at the sound of that cold, sweet voice from the doorway. Lady Rosamund stood there, framed in darkness, immaculate as ever, the red-purple stole that marked her position in the Council sparkling faintly in the fire's reflected light. The Church wizards bowed to her and stepped past her through the door, though Joanna sensed they were in the narrow stairway still, listening for the slightest rise in her voice to summon them back.

“And because in your latest confession, you swear that he was injured in trying to apprehend you for your attempt upon the Regent's life. Or didn't you read it this time?”

“No,” Antryg admitted, with a ghost of his old airiness, at which her Ladyship's pink mouth tightened disapprovingly. “I didn't think there would be much point.” He looked down and met Joanna's frightened glance. “They didn't hurt me,” he added, seeing the way her eyes darted to his hands, as if to see what new injuries those threadbare half-gloves might conceal. “But I told them I'd sign anything, as long as it contained a clause saying that I had forced you to help me by means of my spells, and that you were not responsible for what you did. At least they didn't have to tie the pen in my fingers this time.”

Joanna opened her mouth protestingly, his image in the firelight and shadows suddenly blurring with her tears. He put out a hand and brushed her tangled blond hair.

“Joanna, there was never a shred of proof that things were as we said they were. Even the DARKMAGE files are gone now.”

Crushed and miserable, she looked away. After a moment, he gathered her in his long, bony arms, holding her against him, the fabric of his shabby purple doctor's robe and the ruffled shirt he wore beneath it soft and scratchy as an animal's pelt against her cheek. She wondered what had happened to her, whether it was the pain and shock of her burns in spite of the wizards' treatment of them or whether she was simply too weary to go on fighting. She seemed to have come to the end of her subroutines. For the first time, she understood that she, too, stood in danger of imprisonment or execution in this world—that she, too, faced punishment as Antryg's accomplice. But she felt only exhaustion, her mind too tired to grope for the next possible course of action. It was very odd, she thought detachedly, only to sit here in the strong ring of his arms, comfortable in the single present moment, and let events take their course into a black and hopeless future.

Past her shoulder, she heard Lady Rosamund say, “Minhyrdin has gone to Larkmoor, with Issay Bel-Caire, to deliver your confession to the Regent and to ask for clemency for the girl. Whether that perverted mad dog will grant it or not, I cannot say; but beyond a doubt, before they return, the Regent's messenger will arrive with the orders concerning the manner of your death.”

Joanna felt Antryg shiver, but he only murmured, “Thank you.” A moment later she heard the two Church wizards reenter and the whisper of the Lady's black robes as she passed down the stairs.

“Why did you let me live?”

Caris was a little surprised at the weakness of his own voice. Once the words were spoken, he doubted they had carried as far as the carved armchair between his bed and the window, through which the bare trees of the windbreak could be seen clawing the dun-colored sky. But the old lady who slumped there like a bag of black wool raised her head, the thin light catching silvery on the cap of her hair. The steady click of her everpresent knitting did not stop.

“Hush, boy,” was all she said.

“Whatever you told the Regent, you know I broke my vows,” Caris went on, finding every word an effort against the lassitude of weakness and drugs. “I may have turned my back on the Way of the Sasenna, but I know what it means. They say a sasennan who breaks his vows, for whatever reason seems good, proves nothing about that reason, but only that he is a man who will break his vows. And then,” he added, moving his bandaged hand on the coverlet, and wincing against the stab of the dulled pain, “I don't imagine the Council had much use for broken sword blades. No one does.”

“Nonsense.”
The old lady gave her knitting a tweak to clear its tangled strands and glanced sidelong at him with those faded blue eyes. “All things have their uses—even broken sword blades. Was your reason so good?”

“I thought so.”

Partly from weakness and partly from his bitter self-recrimination, he spoke half to himself, barely audible, and perhaps the old lady did not hear, for she lapsed back into fussing with her knitting like any old granny by her hearth, muttering to herself as she did. “I knew him,” Caris heard that thin, wavery old voice mumble. “Not well, but I knew him—no one really knew him well but that poor boy of his. And I knew your grandfather and the Emperor, that was the Prince then, and so handsome. I talked to Antryg when he signed all those papers they wanted him to sign last night—meddler, oathbreaker, and mad, yes, completely mad. But I knew them all.” Her weak blue glance flicked to him, suddenly disconcertingly bright. “You do as I say, little son. You get well...”

“For what?” he burst out desperately. “To live as a cripple? I was no good as a wizard, and now as a weapon, too, I am flawed...”

“Then be just a man.” She seemed to forget that her yarn had become tangled in her too—long black sleeves and resumed the steady clacking of her needles, her little white head bent over them, her face in the crossed lights of the window and the fireplace nearby like a very wrinkled apple at the bottom of the winter barrel. “Is it so hard?”

Caris said softly, “Yes.”

“Are you sasennan of the Council?”

There were times when Aunt Min reminded Caris of the old weapons riddle among the sasenna—that hatpins could also draw blood. After long silence he stammered, “I vowed to be so, to the end of my life. But I don't know.”

She made no reply to that. Caris realized the clicking of the needles had stilled and, turning his head on the pillow, saw that she had fallen asleep.

For a long time he lay still, staring at the play of honey-colored firelight on the red cedar of the rafters overhead. He felt as if his life had been laid down on the coverlet beside his remaining hand, and that it was now his choice as to whether he would pick it up again.

The numbness of his soul, cracking these long weeks, had broken like spring ice, and pain welled through like a dark fluid—the pain of a child whose soul will not bow to the responsible rhythms of seedtime and harvest, no matter how he loves them and those who try to teach them to him, the pain of a youth whose inner magic is simply not strong enough to make him a mage. At the age of sixteen he had vowed away that pain, the pain of choosing and of wanting. As a result, he was aware now that he had little experience of either.

Tears leaked from his eyes, hot on his temples—not the stifled, hurtful tears of anguish shed at his grandfather's murder, but tears of weariness and of deeper grief that leached from his soul poisons of which he had long been unaware. As a sasennan, it was expected of him that he refuse to continue as a cripple in his life—he who, like a fighting-dog, had been trained for nothing else.

And yet...

As if a door had been opened, he seemed to smell again the fragile sweetness of the dried herbs in Antryg's medical pouch that had been left behind, with so many other things, in the chapel on the north bank of the Glidden. The kinesthetic memory of sifting salts and powders together came back to him and Antryg's deep voice, speaking of the qualities of certain plants—ground holly for rheumatism, slippery elm for disorders of the bowels, the white berries of mistletoe for bleeding. He recalled the way his hands had warmed when the healing light passed from them into the body of another and the shattering touch of a newborn child's mind on his...

He was not aware that he had slept until he began to wake again, floating, it seemed, a few inches beneath the surface of dreams, aware that the firelight had deepened to amber with the turning of the afternoon light. He was aware of the small warmth of Kyssha lying curled against his side, her nose under what was left of his bandaged hand, and of the strength of Pella's fingers over his own. From somewhere in the room, he heard the rustle of silk taffeta and Pharos' voice saying softly, “I thought I should find you here.”