The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  “Not against Suraklin.”

  “He doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “He will. By the saints, girl, don’t you listen to anything?” He swung back to face her, anger struggling with fear in his absinthe-colored eyes. “I never lived in Kymil—the Church has always been too strong in that town for a dog wizard to be comfortable—but I passed through it when Suraklin was alive. I tell you there was nothing that went on there that he didn’t know, no one whose life he could not tamper with if they did not obey his ...He called them ‘requests.’

  “The first time I saw him was in the marketplace, a thin, biscuit-colored man with his long hair tied in a tail down his back and his yellow eyes like a cat’s, watching the stall holders’ children playing in the gutters. He walked over to a little girl of about four and took her—just took her by the hand and led her away through the market, in front of the whole population of Kymil, and nobody did a thing! I was so shocked I wondered for a moment whether he mightn’t have been using some kind of cloaking-spell—which, as mageborn myself, I could see through when others couldn’t. But one of the little boys ran to the girl’s mother, pointing after them and telling her. And she shushed him. I’ll never forget the tears running down her face as she watched them leave the market nor that damned, smug look of satisfaction on Suraklin’s. My child, I’ll have nothing to do with Suraklin.”

  Had Suraklin done that with Antryg? Joanna wondered—just walked up to that overgrown, skinny boy of nine in some outback Sykerst town and taken him by the hand, smelling out the powers in his mind and wanting them for his own? Or because of the boy’s powers, had he seduced Antryg through dreams, as he had seduced Gary, long before they met, to win his trust?

  “Then help me save Antryg,” she said quietly. When he averted his gaze from her again, she reached across the table and caught at the pleated ruffle of his wrist. “Magus, please! I have to start somewhere...”

  “Even if you could somehow get into the Tower itself, getting the Sigil off him might not help, after this long.”

  Her voice breaking with despair, she cried, “I have to try! Magus, I can’t do this all by myself! Suraklin has to be defeated...”

  With the gentle swiftness of one long used to dealing with female hysterics, Magister Magus was on his feet, around the table, and holding her comfortingly in his arms. And, in spite of her fury at him and her frustrated rage at his cowardice, Joanna found a great deal of comfort in the firm strength of his hold, the warmth of his hands on hers, and the mingled smell of perfume, candle wax, and incense that clung to his clothes. “My child, I’m telling you he can’t be,” the Magus said softly. “I know you consider me a coward and a villain...”

  She raised her head from that strong, slender shoulder and looked into the green eyes beneath the silver-shot black brows, seeing in them the man’s genuine quixotic chivalry struggling with his fear of pain and death.

  He went on, with a kind of apologetic dignity, “My position was bad enough before, with the Witchfinders always sniffing at my heels and the Regent staring daggers at me every time our paths crossed at the Palace, in spite of my being under the protection of his cousin and heir. Now with the abominations multiplying in the countryside, with the harvest on the verge of failing, the Saarieque trade-fleet not yet in and every fortune in the Empire in a tizzy, with rumors of plots by wizards flying thick as grasshoppers in a dry summer...My child, it would take so little for me to end up before the Inquisition myself. It would be safer for me not to let you stay here at all...”

  Panic clutched her; he touched her hair reassuringly, the dozen candles in their holder on the table throwing faint, multiple shadows across the tired lines of hopelessness on his face. “I can only beg you to remember my position here and not bring down the Witchfinders, the Council of Wizards, or the abominable Prince Regent’s notice on me while you’re under my roof. Further than that I cannot go. I have met Suraklin, my child; I’ve seen his power. Believe me, the consequences of going against him are one of the few things I can think of worse than death.”

  Joanna sighed, feeling very weak and wishing there were someone else to do all this for her. “Unfortunately,” she said, “so are the consequences of not going against him. So I really have no choice.”

  The noodle vendor whose little cart leaked steam into the damp air looked askance at Joanna, but pointed out to her the direction she had asked. This part of Angelshand was a far cry from Governor’s Square. Crumbling brick tenements and soot-rotted half-timbered edifices leaned against one another in the fog like homeward-bound drunks. Down alleyways which Joanna could have spanned with her arms, mazes of laundry fluttered above reeking streams of half-frozen sewage through which beggar-children splashed, shrieking, their feet wrapped in rags. The shops that gazed like the gloomy eyesockets of skulls into the narrow lanes seemed to be of only three types—secondhand clothes, pawnshops, or gin palaces from whose doors, even at this hour of the afternoon, trickled snatches of drunken singing. The men and women whose feet churned at the icy slime that smeared the flagways increasingly wore the dark gabardine and looped-up braids of the Old Believers, and once Joanna glimpsed across the street a red-haired girl in the billowing black robes of a mage.

  Nervously, Joanna patted under her cloak the awkward bulge of the .38 that distended the pocket of her dress. She wasn’t sure what Caris’ reaction to her return would be, but she didn’t believe in taking chances. Knowing what he knew, Caris would guess at once that there could be only one reason for her to come back.

  The Mages’ Yard was a narrow court of eight or nine shabby houses, brooding in the raw brown mists over scummed and uneven cobblestones. As she passed it, Joanna saw few people about, save for an Old Believer woman sweeping her doorstep and a boy in rags peddling kindling from house to house. Autumn in Angelshand was a dreary time. The long winds from the southwest, the ship-winds, slacked as the trade season drew to its close, and the fogs and rains settled in. Iron cold was locking down on the land. The Sykerst would already be under snow.

  The harvest had failed; from the number of beggars Joanna had seen she guessed the cost of bread was up. According to Magister Magus, poverty was always worst in the city in early autumn, just before the great silk and tea fleets came in from Saarieque to provide their annual stimulus to the economy. He had spoken of this philosophically. Joanna, raised with the comfort of a public welfare system that never really let anybody starve, found those hollowed eyes and emaciated faces horribly disquieting.

  As she lingered at the head of the Mages’ Yard, one of the house doors opened, and a small group of wizards and sasenna emerged. In their center she recognized the Lady Rosamund, coldly beautiful and seemingly oblivious to the bitter chill of the afternoon, laying down the law about something to a silver-haired androgyne who flitted along at her side like a dandelion seed. Her breath steamed cloudy in the grimy air, and her voice struck fragments of words, like glass chimes, from the hard walls of the court. Mindful not to call attention to herself by hurrying, Joanna idled away down the street, glad for the concealing hood of her cloak.

  Of all the mages, she feared most to meet the Lady Rosamund.

  In a tavern down the block, she gave the innkeeper’s boy a copper bit to take a message to Stonne Caris in the Mages’ Yard. Sitting in the half-empty ordinary room, she wondered what she would say to the Archmage’s grandson, the young man who had risked his life to pursue and capture Antryg and bring him to the Council’s justice. The last time she had seen him came back to her, when he and the Church wizards had beaten Antryg to his knees at his last, desperate attempt at flight, and had dragged him back through the dark Gate in the Void. Caris had worn a look of calm, the serenity of a man once more back in the world he knew. She recalled, too, the dark scenes of her dream.

  But Caris had traveled with Antryg and her from Kymil to Angelshand. With his rudimentary powers, he had felt the draining-off of the world’s life to fuel Suraklin’s computer; he had dealt with t
he abominations which came through the Void at its opening, and he had heard Antryg speak of the danger that lay in those gray times of grief. He was, Joanna realized, one of the very few people who might conceivably believe what was going on. And, though she wasn’t sure how much bearing it would have on Caris’ attitude, Antryg had saved his life.

  The door opened. Murky whitish light filtered dimly into the brown gloom. Looking up, Joanna saw Caris silhouetted against the gray cold of the street—a young Greek god, foster-raised in Valhalla, with the loose black clothing of a sasennan and a thickly quilted jacket not quite blurring the gymnast poise of the body and his short quiff of cornsilk-yellow hair falling over his forehead. The sword and daggers of the ancient order of sworn warriors glinted among a brass-buckled strapwork of weapons belts and a dark silk sword sash. Coffee-brown, tip-tilted eyes touched her, went on to scan the room for potential dangers, and returned to her.

  His face expressionless, he turned on his heel and strode out again.

  Startled and hurt, Joanna lunged to her feet, tripped on her petticoats, and cursed. The cold outside was like a slap in the face; in the bleak, narrow street, Caris was nowhere to be seen. A glance at the black mud underfoot showed her the marks of his soft-soled boots. Holding up her skirts, she followed around the corner into an alley...

  Hard hands grabbed her elbows from behind. Joanna cried out with shock as she was shoved face-forward against the sooty brick of a wall; a hand blocked her jabbing elbow as another clawed through the layers of her cloak at the pocket of her skirt.

  It was all over in less than a second, and Caris turned her around, holding her hard against the wall with one hand while he shoved the .38 into his sword sash with the other. His brown eyes were flat and cold, as if they had never met.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  She braced her feet against the jerk of his hand. His beauty had always intimidated her, but she had never had cause to feel his strength before. It was terrifying. Of course, she thought, he’s been working out eight hours a day since he was fourteen. “Caris, no...”

  He paused. His face was as she had seen it in her dream, expressionless, but with emotion raging far back in the depths of his eyes. “You shouldn’t have come back, Joanna. You understand that now the Archmage won’t be able to let you go.” Like his face, there was nothing in his voice.

  It was something Joanna hadn’t counted on and it hit her like a blow to the stomach. She had known that if she met Lady Rosamund she would be recognized and identified as what she was now, Antryg’s willing accomplice instead of his victim. The thought that she, too, might be imprisoned by the wizards hadn’t even occurred to her. With it came the sinking realization that, while she had given plausible reasons for her disappearance in her own world which would prevent people from looking for her, in this world, legally, she did not exist at all. If she vanished, no one would know, except Magister Magus, who would undoubtedly be too terrified to inquire.

  Her first impulse was to plead. But something in Caris’ inhuman blankness sparked anger in her instead, and she set her feet and twisted her arm defiantly against the steel grip. “Look, would you pretend you have a will of your own for about five minutes?”

  She saw the flare of his nostrils with his responding anger but, as is the Way of the Sasenna, he mastered it and only said levelly, “Having a will of my own kept me from killing Antryg Windrose the moment I caught him. Had I been obedient to the dictates of the council, my grandfather would be alive today.”

  Joanna used a phrase she’d picked up from the stagecoach drivers on the way to Angelshand and added, “You were obedient to the dictates of the Council when you let your grandfather go to meet him alone, both times, first at the Silent Tower, then at Gary’s. Even if he wasn’t duping you, do you think your unthinking obedience helped him any?”

  The breath steamed from his lips—one, two breaths. His grip didn’t change. “When I took my vows as sasennan, I turned my will over to the Council of Wizards,” he said. “Whether your arguments are right or wrong doesn’t concern me.”

  “Does it concern you that even having Antryg under lock and key, sealed in the Silent Tower under the Sigil of Darkness and driven out of his mind by what they’ve done to him, the fading of magic, the draining of life, is still going on? If the abominations were Antryg’s doing, why are they still appearing?”

  “Because he still lives.” He thrust her toward the mouth of the alley; Joanna pulled vainly against that frightening strength. Terrified at the thought of facing the Council, she forced her mind to focus, not on her fear, but on her rage.

  “Dammit, would you act like a man instead of a goddam computer!”

  That offended him out of his stony calm. “It is a man who is loyal...”

  She finally succeeded in wrenching her arm free of his grip and stood, angrily rubbing it through her cloak. “I’ve talked to a lot of computers in my time and, believe me, I’ve gotten more discrimination and judgment out of a six-K ops program than I’m getting out of you!”

  They stood close together in the murky shades of the alley, like a fair-haired brother and sister at the tail end of a shouting match. Caris was breathing hard now with fury, his hand half drawn back, as if he would strike her. If he does, she thought, too angry now to let herself fear, so help me I’ll rip his ears off.

  But slowly, the iron expression on Caris’ face faded. Fleetingly, it looked young and troubled—she remembered he was only nineteen—as it had before his grandfather’s murder had hardened his soul into the perfection of his vows. Quietly, he said, “It isn’t up to me to discriminate or to judge—or even to listen. I know you to be an enemy of the will of the Council. You’re here to rescue Antryg, aren’t you?”

  “You flatter him,” Joanna said slowly. “And you insult me, by the way. I’m here because I know, and you know, that Antryg’s old master Suraklin didn’t die twenty-five years ago when he was supposed to have been killed. Only two people knew that—Antryg and Suraklin himself. Caris, for the last four years Suraklin was occupying the brain and body of your grandfather Salteris.”

  “No.” The flat harshness returned to his voice, the rage to his eyes. “He told you that, didn’t he? To save his own skin. Had I known he had calumnated Salteris so, I would have...”

  “Slit his wrists back at the Tower when he begged you to?” That threw him off balance. She pressed on. “There was a man I knew back in my own world, the owner of the house where we were, the house where all Suraklin’s marks were found. After your grandfather died—after Suraklin left his body, imbecile as he left the Emperor’s—this man had all the mannerisms and the patterns of speech that I knew in your grandfather. According to your grandfather himself, who else could download his personality from body to body, from brain to brain, except Suraklin? Caris, we got the wrong man. We were both duped. And now we have to stop Suraklin, and Antryg—if we can get him out of the Silent Tower, if we can get the Sigil of Darkness off him—is the only one who might be able to help us.”

  “That’s a lie,” the sasennan said, his voice like the iron earth of winter. “Antryg murdered my grandfather. He betrayed his trust—he was Suraklin...”

  “Caris,” Joanna said quietly, “wasn’t there ever a time when your grandfather—changed?”

  He looked away. “No....It was because of my grandmother’s death. He loved her.” His jaw tightened. For a moment, the grief and anger in him seemed to seethe up beneath the stiff rock barriers erected by the Way of the Sasenna. When he looked back at her, there was something close to hatred in his brown eyes.

  “Don’t you understand that what I think about it doesn’t matter?” The words came jerkily, as if the very framing of them were difficult. “Your telling me this ...I am sworn to be the weapon of the Council and only that. I’m not—qualified—to judge these matters. It is not the Way of the Sasenna to be.”

  Looking up into his face, Joanna suddenly felt very sorry for this gorgeous, muscular young man,
this honed and glistening blade. After all, she thought, he had traded in the pain of making decisions for the steady comfort of knowing that in following orders, no matter what they were, he would always be in the right. Pain like that could be turned away from, but it was always there waiting, and now he had no experience in dealing with it.

  Her anger at him faded. “I’m sorry,” she said. Turning, she walked away down the alley toward the muddy pavement of the street. Grief and defeat filled her, as exhausting as if she had indeed fought him hand to hand. Caris remained standing where he was, looking after that small, cloaked figure, like a statue, save for the mist of his breath. Only when she was halfway back to Magister Magus’ did Joanna realize that he hadn’t, after all, followed his duty and caught her again and only much later that evening did she remember that he had kept her gun.

  Chapter IV

  THIS IS MY LAST CHANCE. A footman in the emerald green velvet livery of the Prince Cerdic’s household opened the door of Magister Magus’ anonymous dark carriage and helped Joanna down—a gesture she had always considered a quaint formality until she’d actually tried getting out of a high-slung vehicle in half a dozen layers of petticoats and skirts. This had better work.

  If it didn’t, she had no idea where to go next.

  She tipped the man the amount prescribed by Magister Magus, that expert in the nuances of Court conduct, and walked up the pink marble steps of the Dower House, one of the smallest of the several palaces which dotted the vast, fairy-tale parklands comprising the Imperial Seat. She found that, on the whole, she felt worse than she had when she’d knocked on Magister Magus’ door for the first time. On that occasion at least, she reflected, she’d had the comfort of several courses of action open to her—if not Magister Magus, then Caris; if not Caris, then Cerdic the Prince, first cousin of the Regent and Heir, after him, to the Empire.