The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (41 page)

The hand over his flinched, but did not release its hold.

“I just thought you ought to know, my little Princess, that Leynart has indeed fallen ill with smallpox. The mage Bel-Caire is with him. So it seems you did save my life.”

He heard her take in breath to answer, then hesitate for a moment, as if not sure what to say to those inscrutable blue eyes. Then she spoke, her deep voice like an alto flute in the gloom. “I'm sorry Ley is ill.”

Pharos sniffed. There was the muted click of high heels on the parquet of the floor—Caris remembered, half-dreaming, that the Regent walked very quietly—and the overwhelming waft of orris-root perfume. “Tedious little bitch. I expect if he survives, his looks will be gone, though I'll see he gets some reward for his devotion.”

Pella's voice was angry. “He only did it for love of you.”

“Let himself be made a dupe? Tried to work magic on me that he didn't understand, on the bare word of someone he didn't know that it was for his own good and mine, and not my heir's? That silken rat you call a dog has more brains—more courage, too.”

“That's still no cause to be cruel.”

“As far as I've ever been able to ascertain, my little—Pellicida...” Caris heard him change his form of address to her and knew that, again, he had met her eyes. “. . . the world has never had any cause to be cruel to me or to you. But I think we've both suffered a certain amount of pain anyway. I'm sorry,” he added, his voice halting on the words. “You did not have to save my life. I pay Kanner to do things like that. Hurting the weak is a habit with me—a bad one, like biting my fingernails. I'll try not to do it to you again. You had at least one good reason to wish me dead—was this young man another?”

“No.” Pella's hand closed more tightly around Caris' fingers, and he heard the slide of her hair over her satin shoulders as she bowed her head. “Neither of us wished you dead.”

“Ah.” The way she had spoken the word “us” was, even to Caris' ears, unmistakable. “I thought I did not recognize him as one of my men, in spite of the uniform.” There was a slight, undefinable shift in the harsh voice. “They say you're with child. Is this true?”

Again he heard the dry slither of her hair.

“Yes.”

Caris opened his eyes, to see those two forms silhouetted in the amber light, Pharos standing like some pretty doll in black and gold, two white fingers emerging from an explosion of sable lace to rest lightly beneath Pella's chin. The girl was gazing up into his face, her green eyes unwavering, looking very young and yet very calm, as she had in the clash with Leynart—the face of a sasennan who is also a queen.

Pharos' mouth twitched in a wry expression. “A pity, in a way,” he said at last. “A madman, a credulous fool, and an idiot are no advertisement for a dynasty, whatever our respective families might say. I am not good myself, any more than I am a man for women, but I do know goodness when I see it—and I know that the good are often happy as well.”

There was a long pause as he studied her, this girl whose spirit he had never been able to break, and the scorn in his eyes with which he looked upon a hostile world seemed to abate, as it had abated a little in the study at Devilsgate.

“Well,” he said at last, “God knows I have little use for a woman, except to bear me an heir, and you seem to be fulfilling that part of what strikes me as a rather agricultural custom. So I will ask of you only that you raise my child and whatever other children you may happen to bear, with a sense of responsibility for the Empire and whatever happiness you can manage to give them as well.” Picking up her other hand, he kissed it, turned in a great rustling of black silk ribbons, and walked toward the door.

Pella rose, holding out her hand. “Pharos...”

He paused, looking back. “Yes, Pellicida?”

“What about Antryg and Joanna?”

The Regent hesitated for a long moment, the old vindictive paranoia gleaming once more in his pale blue eyes. “They betrayed me,” he said at last, with soft and vicious finality in his voice. “Both of them.”

“They were trying...”

“We have Windrose's confession,” Pharos cut her off, his shrill voice suddenly harsh. “That same document exonerates your friend here...” The diamonds of his rings glittered sharply around the great, cut hematite in the middle, live stars circling a dead one, as he gestured to Caris. Then, he went on quietly, as a ruler explaining a decision to a counsellor he trusts, “You must have known there was never hope for his reprieve. The messenger has already left for the Silent Tower. Sentence on them both will be carried out tomorrow.”

“Both?” protested Pella. "Joanna...

The small hand waved aside her fear. “Oh, never fret. It isn't your affair...” Pella started to rise, and Pharos went on hastily, “Of course, nothing fatal will be done to her—banishment—imprisonment...” But Caris saw his pale eyes shift from hers as he turned toward the door and heard the careless evasiveness of the voice. Caris knew that Pharos lied.

Even through the thick walls of the Silent Tower, Joanna heard the stormwinds rise, groaning in the wheel-spoke rafters overhead. As Antryg had said, even in the summertime, the Tower was icy cold; now in the dead of winter, the wind slipped like black snakes through the barred and hidden ventilation slits to drain the warmth of the room. She and Antryg had sat for a long time before the fire, sharing his scruffy cloak and one of the quilts from the bed, while the two hasu watching them shivered slightly, having indignantly refused Antryg's offers of other blankets.

They had talked, of California, of Mellidane, of Antryg's village of Velskonoe on the edge of the taiga forest deep in the Sykerst, whence Suraklin had taken him as a child, of Star Wars and the different types of magic, and of the possibility of Joanna's imprisonment for a greater or lesser time in this world.

“I tried to do what was best,” Antryg said softly, his breath stirring the ends of her hair on top of her head. “Unfortunately, it's something I've never been terribly good at. I couldn't leave Caris; and if I'd simply sent you away, you wouldn't have gotten far before the wizards caught you anyway. There were still abominations about, too.”

“And I wouldn't have gone.” She raised her cheek from his chest long enough to push clear one of his trashy glass necklaces, then settled it back again.

“Oh, Joanna.”
He sighed, and tightened his arms around her shoulders. “I did want to keep you out of it, as much as I could. It isn't the first time my friends have been hurt through my meddling. It's just that I needed you too much...”

“Hey, they always said computer consultant was a high-demand field.”

He laughed softly and looked down into her face. “That wasn't what I meant.”

She knew it hadn't been and felt her throat tighten again with tears. But all she said was, “I knew the job was dirty when I took it.” She wondered, feeling the hardness of muscle and rib through the baggy folds of the robe beneath her cheek, how long they would keep her prisoner here, and if she would ever make it back to California. Her old life seemed very strange and distant to her. The thought of being here alone made her feel weak and frightened, but it was totally peripheral to that blacker grief she resolutely refused to contemplate, the knowledge that Antryg was going to die.

She had fought it as a rearguard action for so many months that at times it seemed completely unreal, and his perfectly genuine cheerfulness tricked her mind away from it still further. But she'd seen it in the eyes of the Church dogs and heard it in the whispers of the mages who guarded her cell. Antryg was going to die and, in all probability, die tomorrow.

After tomorrow, she would never see him again.

Except, perhaps, in dreams.

In the darkness of the twisted stairwell, Joanna heard the moan of the wind and then the Lady Rosamund's voice, raised in indignation, “Don't be absurd! The Regent has no intention of letting her go and you know it!”

Then she heard old Minhyrdin the Fair's creaky little wheeze, coming closer with the scuffle of her laborious feet. “Nonsense. What know you of the Regent's plans—or care?” The two women, lady and crone, appeared in the darkness of the doorway. With an impatient sign, the Lady Rosamund dismissed the two guards. Aunt Min peered up at the elegant Lady with a shrewd old eye and added, “Or do you care what Pharos thinks?”

“Of course not!” her Ladyship retorted hotly. “But simply to go against his orders...”

“His orders have not yet arrived,” the old lady pointed out blandly, turning her head a little, because of the stooping of her bent back, to look up at Lady Rosamund. “How are we to know his intention? His messenger has been delayed by the storm.” Aunt Min's black robe was wet through and her cloak, patched, shabbier even than Antryg's, was covered with flakes of melting snow and ice. She was drawing off her knitted red and green mittens and getting the ends of her muffler tangled in her eternal knitting, which, clotted with ice, was still in its basket under her arm.

Lady Rosamund's eyes narrowed suspiciously. “When I scried the skies this morning, I saw no trace of a coming storm.”

Antryg smiled graciously from his seat beside the hearth and chipped in, “Well, these things come with practice.” Joanna almost stifled, trying not to laugh at the way the Lady's green eyes flared with rage.

Unperturbed, Aunt Min continued, “But since we have received no orders, run along now and fetch what I asked you.”

"We have no right...

The withered little ancient drew herself with some effort to her full height—an inch or so less than Joanna's five-foot-barely. And Joanna, looking at that old, seamed face in its thin tatter of white hair, suddenly understood why she had once been called Minhyrdin the Fair by all. In a voice totally unlike her usual vague mumbling, she said, “I am the Archmage. I have the right.” Then she dropped her knitting and bent laboriously to pick it up, dropping the needles as she did so. She fumbled for them. The Lady Rosamund bent to help her, and Aunt Min waved her fussily away. “Oh, let it be, Rosie! Now run along and do as I asked.”

Stiffly, her Ladyship straightened up and strode with an indignant billow of black robes into the darkness of the stair. Joanna and Antryg both got to their feet and went to help Aunt Min, Archmage of the Council of Wizards, collect her scattered belongings.

“Thank you,” the old lady said, shoving the sodden tangle of wool haphazardly back into her basket and sticking the needles into it at random. “Thank you, my dears.” She had to twist her spine to look up at Antryg's great height. She reached out to pat his big, crooked-fingered hand. “You always were a good boy.”

He smiled down at her and held out his hand to help her to a chair. “No,” he said, with genuine regret. “But I always did want to be. I never thanked you for speaking out for me at the end of summer when they brought me back here...”

“Only to escape again.”
She shook her head, clicking her tongue pettishly, as if at a child's scrapes. “I knew him, you see—knew Suraklin. I knew them all.”

“I remember.” Antryg smiled. “In fact I remember you taking a broom-handle to him, the one time you were at the Citadel... at the time I was shocked to death, of course.”

The old lady chuckled, her pale eyes warming briefly with a trace of their old color. Then she sobered and said, “It cannot be so again.”

“I know,” Antryg said quietly. The brown mark left by the Sigil of Darkness showed up more darkly against the whiteness of his face. “Just please get Joanna out of here.”

“Since we have received no orders from the Regent concerning the girl Joanna,” the old lady said, “though we have no jurisdiction over her, as Archmage I think it best that she be taken back to the place where we came through the Void, the shed marked with Suraklin's marks.”

Joanna felt Antryg's long fingers close tightly around hers; then he said, “Thank you.”

She was looking up into his face as he glanced past Aunt Min to the shadow of the door and saw what was left of the color there drain away. Her glance flicked after his. Lady Rosamund stood there, silent and disapproving, in her hands a cup made of gold and horn.

Aunt Min looked, too, and nodded her little head. “Set it down, dear, set it down,” she instructed, making vague little gestures toward the table and dropping her knitting again. Automatically Antryg stooped to retrieve it, then straightened up again as the old lady continued, “And be careful of it, Rosie—it's poison, you know.”

Her Ladyship's beautiful mouth flexed with disapproval as she turned and stalked from the room once again. Aunt Min plucked her knitting needles from Antryg's yielding hand and said, “You know there is nothing we can do for you. The original sentence of death is still in effect.”

Joanna remembered Antryg's airy recital—hanged, broken, skinned, and sliced... At the time, that day-long public torture had seemed so far away.

Antryg whispered, “I know.”

The old lady added, “I am sorry.”

Antryg nodded and patted her tiny hand where it curled around his own.

Joanna caught his sleeve, her mind refusing to take it in. It seemed to her that the warmth and the color of the afternoon was still on her and the taste of the deep and nebulous joy of mingled friendship and love. She had the helpless, protesting sense of being suddenly forced to leave a party long before it was over, of losing something which had been, and should have been, part of her for years.

Aunt Min touched her arm. “You had better come along, my dear. The storm won't be a long one.” She said it with a serene knowledge that was almost comical, but for the circumstances. “There is no knowing when the messenger will come and then, of course, whatever orders he bears must take effect.”

Joanna shook her head, her mind a blank of darkness and grief. Antryg folded her gently into his arms and bent his tall height to press his mouth to hers. Her hands tightened over the patched robe and tangled in the long gray hair. For a moment, it was as if she were trying to memorize, once for all, the sinewy movement of the loose-jointed frame, the magpie sparkle of beads and diamonds, cracked spectacles, and those wide, intent gray eyes, and the brocaded flamboyance of his deep voice.