The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage (31 page)

“Those teles, those stones, are now going to be in use constantly and have magic pouring through them twenty-four hours a day. It may all go as Suraklin believes it will for a year or two or ten—but how long will it be before those voices begin to bleed into Suraklin's mind, his self, locked in the computer and at the mercy of his input? All magic is balance, because all magic is individuated. When it all gets bound together into one giant interlocking web, we have no idea what could happen. Neither has Suraklin. But he's dangerous because he thinks that nothing will.”

The travelers remained for three days in the ruined chapel on the north bank of the River Glidden, waiting for the next spell of deadness. The weather was cold, though not the brutal, piercing cold of the Sykerst; sheet ice broadened out from the banks, a film of it entirely covering the river between the shore and Tilrattin Island by night, only to crack away at midday. It was a still time, but desperately unrestful.

Antryg spent a good deal of his time in the stone circle and refused ever to get very far away from it. Though Caris knew he should have been concentrating his energies on honing his warrior's skills—on hunting the shy beasts of winter to sharpen his reflexes or on swordsmanship and shooting that he had perforce neglected during the days of steady walking—he found himself accompanying the wizard there. Hungrily, guiltily, as he had learned healing, he learned from him a little of the lore of the stones and that of the energy-trails, listening down the lines for the voices alive in the air. The wizard tried to instruct him, too, in the arts of divining and of seeing things far away. For two nights Caris sat near that tall, gangly figure bent over the fire, gazing into the embers with his spectacles throwing back the fulvous glow, watching the roads for the approach of danger or, indeed, of anyone or anything that might come upon them and spread word of their presence. The Regent had departed the morning after his arrival, and Antryg kept an eye on Leynart at Devilsgate. But the boy remained listless and seldom left the house.

Tormented by the knowledge that he should not be doing so, Caris tried to fan his own slight talents into sufficient strength to do the same.
If the wizard guessed why, he did not say so, and Caris never admitted that what he wanted, as well as a glimpse of Pella, alone at Larkmoor, was to know where the Regent slept that night and how soon he would reach his wife's side.

The circle at the node of the lines was silent. The brown earth dreamed undisturbed under the mantle of coming winter. Joanna, thin and grubby as a shabby little wood-elf, alternated between reading Suraklin's incomprehensible files and checking and rechecking the contents of her backpack and the hardcopy, as she called it, of her own “worm” that she planned to feed into Suraklin's computer to destroy everything on its disks. Caris reflected bitterly that, like her, he should have been readying himself for the coming battle, not spending his time in pursuit of what would not help them and in any case could never be his.

Once in the night he slipped away from the chapel to wade the iceskinned river and knelt in the circle's darkness at the side of the divining well. But its unfrozen waters showed him nothing, save the chilly blaze of the watching stars visible above the rising river fog, and he found that being in the circle alone troubled him. He was hideously conscious of the stones standing behind him in the cold starlight and prey to the uneasy sensation that as soon as he took his eyes off them they might move.

By day he was seized with a violent restlessness. Once or twice Antryg stripped out of his cloak and voluminous green coat and fenced with him, using trimmed saplings for swords instead of the razor-sharp weapons. Cans invariably felt himself worsted and cursed his sloth still further. At other times he merely patrolled the woods, as if by constant movement he could outwalk his burning awareness of how far Pharos must be on his journey and how soon he would be at Pella's side.

It was on one of these patrols that Caris heard the approach of the troops.

It was a clear evening and sharply cold; sound carried a great distance in the colorless ranks of the bare woods. Caris heard the strike of hooves first on the hard-frozen roadbed, and slipped quickly down into the concealment of the overgrown ditch at its side. It was only as the sounds came nearer and he realized that the troop must number nearly a hundred riders and a number of carriages that it came to him that something was fearfully wrong.

Antryg had had no warning of their approach. Yesterday he'd noted the presence of a peddler on the way to the village on the other side of Devilsgate, the passage of a wedding party from the village church. How could he possibly have missed an entourage of that size?

Baffled, Caris raised his head. White facings stood out on the unfamiliar black uniforms of fifty mounted sasenna, like floating bars of moonlight in the gathering gloom; they were followed by nearly as many household cavalry in emerald green. For the most part, the sasenna looked very young, newly fledged, newly sworn, tough and cold and trained to a hair. They surrounded a four-horse traveling coach, while several smaller vehicles with baggage brought up the rear.

He couldn't have missed it,
Caris thought, baffled. Yet why would he lie?

The only place they could possibly have been heading was Devilsgate itself. Moving cross-country through the woods, Caris was at the big rose-red manor before them. Without Pharos' sasenna in the gardens, the place was far easier to slip into. The marble gazebo with its thin screen of trellises offered ample concealment and a good view, through the spyglass, of the front of the house; with luck Caris calculated that he could be away from the place by the time sasenna or guards were posted around the house or, at worst, pass himself off as one of them in his black coat in the evening gloom.

Leynart was on the steps of the manor, his primrose silk costume glimmering like a ghost in the dusk. He looked weary and haggard, as if he had found the last two days no easier than Caris had; in the dark frame of his curly hair the lines and hollows of his face showed through a careful application of concealing paint. The carriage drew to a stop. Through the glass, Caris could see it was drawn by a team of the showiest matched sorrels he had ever seen, the carriage itself ablaze with claret-red lacquer and gilt. The boy Leynart's haunted eyes brightened. He strode down the steps, his hands held out in welcome as the footmen opened the carriage doors.

A man stepped down from the carriage, and Caris realized instantly why Antryg had not had warning of their approach. It was difficult, he knew, for mages to divine the movements of other mages; even the slight spells that he was able to hold around himself would thwart any but a very powerful scryer. And though Magister Magus was generally spoken of as a charlatan, according to Antryg the dapper little gentleman whom the footmen now assisted down did, in fact, have true power.

Presumably, thought Caris dourly, he had been persuaded to use it in trade for being saved from the Witchfinders.

The footmen and Magister Magus bowed low as the second man stepped down from the carriage, and Leynart came forward to catch the lace-gloved hands in his own. Prince Cerdic was a good bit fatter than when Caris had seen him last and wore a suit of plum-colored velvet which must have cost more than the carriage and team combined. Leynart bent over his hands—though the Regent had taken Devilsgate and given it to his eromenos, it was obvious that, from that moment, the youth considered himself Cerdic's guest.

It took Caris a moment to realize who the third man must be. There was something vaguely familiar about his face; it was young, not yet thirty-five, yet settled already into hard and arrogant lines. His clothes were simple, a court suit of dark green and apricot, yet the Prince and Leynart both bowed deeply, and Leynart knelt on the icy gravel of the drive to kiss the man's hand. Perhaps it was the hair that jogged Caris' memory. It was shorter than anyone but sasenna and laborers wore it, yet familiar. He had seen it...

The man moved, gesturing toward the house. With a chill that was not quite anger nor yet quite dread, Caris remembered.

The face was the face of the man he had glimpsed through a darkened window, whining excuses to Joanna while the chaos of music and drinking went on at the party around the courtyard pool, long ago and in another universe. The face was the face of the hapless Gary Fairchild, but Caris recognized the gesture as typical of his grandfather.

He realized he was looking at Suraklin.

“It's just that it isn't fair!” Leynart turned, the snowy embroidery that laced his coat skirts glittering like frost with the movement of his caged pacing. With a passionate gesture, he strode back to the fire where his guests sat, and his words became indistinct to Caris once again.

Caris had calculated that the boy's fulsome welcome of the Prince and the two wizards would have given him time to take up his old hiding place behind the study curtains, had he chosen to, but caution warned him against it. It was one thing to spy upon the Regent, paranoid though he might be. It was another to spy upon Suraklin. Instead, he had carefully jammed the sneck of the study door so it would sit slightly ajar and had stationed himself in the disused alcove down the hall, listening for the steps of the four men as they passed. It was his guess that they would not risk the posting of a guard, for fear of the guard doing precisely what he did—listening. But any passing servant in the dark corridor would not know it.

Through the crack he could see more of the room itself than he had before—dark-paneled in a fashion fifty years out of date, with a deeply coffered ceiling and heavy antique chairs. Its shelves were crowded with books whose titles Caris recognized from his days at the Mages' Yard—tomes of wisdom and charlatanry ranked side by side. The resinous glow of fire and candles mingled along the edges of the Five Mystical Forms carved from polished hematite, objects of mathematical meditation which had become semisacred to one of the more crackpot schools of dog wizardry and gave a queer life to the statues of the twenty-one Old Gods, lurking like watchers among the books of what had once been their faith. Most people these days did not even know their names.

Caris did. Aunt Min, possibly the oldest mage living and certainly the oldest at the Yard, was an Old Believer, though, like most of that discredited faith, she had only chellim, elaborately wrought slips of paper bearing the gods' names, pasted to the walls of her little room and now grubby with age and cooking grease. So he knew most of them, those silent watchers of diorite, hematite, malachite, and jade, who guarded shelf and mantle and whose eyes seemed to move with the shadow of Leynart's feverish stride.

Suraklin remained seated in one of the gilt chairs near the fire, arms propped before him, hands clasped on level with his chin, and forefingers extended to touch his lips. Caris had often seen his grandfather sit so, though not, when he thought of it, back in the days of his childhood. He wondered now how he could possibly have been so stupid as not to realize something was amiss even then. If nothing else, the mocking glint of irony in those brown eyes should have told him long ago that his grandfather had ceased to be grandfather.

But what, he wondered wearily, could he then have done?

Leynart's voice rose again, fighting for composure. “It isn't that I begrudge her position, please don't think that.” His tone was that of a man trying to be just against his every inclination. “But she doesn't care for him. She can't. She only wants his affection for the status it will give her, to fulfill some petty, bourgeois moralities. She'll dull him, stultify him, make him miserable if he tries to please her...”

“I always thought,” purred Suraklin, the very turn and inflection of his voice recognizable as accents Caris had heard in the Archmage's, “that a provincial moneygrubber's niece was hardly the proper choice for a man of Pharos' stature, even were she virtuous, which of course she is not.”

Only years of training let Caris suppress the smothering heatwave of anger and stifle the harsh draw of his breath. Wizards had sharp ears and a sixth sense of danger—spying on them could be unbelievably perilous. His only hope was that Suraklin's mind was occupied with whatever scheme had brought him here and that the man was conceited enough to be at ease among these worshipful victims. The flame-flecked eyes did not even move Caris' way.

Pella had told him of her seduction by the wizard, though she was almost certain the child she carried was not his. For that, too, Caris hated the man. It occurred to him that he was within touching-distance of the end of his quest, only yards from the man he had sworn to kill. The butt of his pistol ground against his ribs; he had only to open the door—

Except, of course, that the pistol was not na-aar.
With even an instant's warning, Suraklin could make it either misfire or blow up in his hand. The house was full of the Prince's sasenna and household guards; Caris doubted that he would get away; and even if he did, where would he run? The resulting dragnet would pull in Antryg and Joanna. Then, truly, all hope would be at an end.

All this passed through his mind in an eyeblink, as Suraklin went on, “No, Leynart, it isn't wrong to begrudge her the Prince's care. You aren't taking anything away from her, you know. All you want, truly, is his recognition of your love—which in fact your loyalty deserves.” He moved his hand. Like a whipped hound eager for forgiveness, Magister Magus got hastily up from his unobtrusive seat in the shadows.

It was the change in Magus that hurt Caris most, hurt and angered him, as if he had seen cruelty to an animal or a child. When he had been the man's guest in Angelshand, he had despised Magus as a dog wizard who made his fortune while the mages at the Yard ate oatbread and worried about the leaks in their roofs. But the Magus had always dealt with him well, had taken care of Joanna when her presence under his roof had been a clear danger to him, and had helped her as much as he could. Seeing how the dapper little charlatan cringed when he approached his new master, Caris could guess how that fear had been instilled. Once Magus had been arrested, there had been no hope for him. Cerdic and his Spiritual Advisor were the only ones who could have saved him from the Inquisition—and Suraklin needed a slave who was a mage.