Like an echo of his troubled thoughts, he saw Pella’s training and her understanding in her eyes. “I know,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. If I’d been a true ruler or even a true sasennan, I’d have sent you away myself.” She smiled wryly across into his eyes, for they were nearly of a height. Her black hair lay thick over the collar of her cloak, like coarse skeins of silk tangled with flecks of hay. Then abruptly she turned away, and preceded him out through the main door of the bedchamber, and into the darkness of the hall.
From the great stairwell, voices could be heard, muffled and distant from the front of the house, and the scurry of feet. A shadow was flung on the dark paneling of the walls—the hall lamps below had been kindled—and there was the quick creak of weight on the stairs. A servant’s voice called, “My lady? His Grace’s carriage is coming. Shall I send your maid up?”
In the reflected glow, Caris saw the girl’s jaw tighten and put his hand on her shoulder. In a voice of forced calm she said, “I—I’d better get myself ready...” Her fingers strayed to her tousled hair, the rough tweed cloak still over her shoulders...
“We should get a guard in that room,” Caris said quietly, like her, hardening himself to speak of commonplaces. “Remember that it won’t be enough to find the smallpox-rose. If Leynart touches it he’ll be infected, and anyone he touches, according to Antryg. He has to be stopped the moment he enters the room, before he even opens the...”
At Pella’s heels, Kyssha suddenly raised her pointed muzzle, her feathered ears snapping in the direction of the state bedchamber, and she let out a shrill bark. Pella’s eyes and Caris’ met for one instant. Then they were both striding back down the hall
The first thing Caris saw when he flung open the chamber door was the great bed, its coverlet now turned welcomingly back, a red rose lying like a great gout of blood upon the pillows. The second was Leynart, standing beside the embroidered curtains, his speedwell-blue eyes enormous with startlement and alarm. Caris strode forward toward him, calling back to Pella, “Get the tongs and throw that thing on the fire!”
The boy gasped with horror. “No!” He snatched up the rose to his chest and dived across the bed a moment before Caris reached him, plunging into the dark rectangle of the back stairs door and slamming it shut behind him. Caris jerked on the hidden handle, but the door held fast.
At the same moment Pella said sharply, “Listen!” Caris heard the grinding crunch of carriage wheels on the drive outside. He swore, gave the handle one final yank, and nearly overset himself when the inner catch gave way; then he was racing down that dark inner stair, hearing the clatter of high, jeweled heels rattling around the narrow turns ahead of him.
He’d be making for the drive. Caris heard the slam of the door at the bottom of the stairs and swore again, called to mind in midrun that the door did in fact open out into the kitchen, tucked his head and his arm, and hurled himself straight off the steps at it with all the momentum he could summon.
The panels burst but the frame of the door held firm, entangling Caris in a splintery web of shards. Swearing, he managed to get his arm through and fumble free the latch that held it. Behind the heat of his anger at the fatuous Leynart, he felt cold dread, remembering the smallpox epidemic that had swept Innkitar during his first year of training there, the stench of smoke and corpses and the quicklime burial-pits at the streetcorners. Pella could be gotten out of here, but many others would die, either of the disease or of being forced to take to the roads in winter.
The clatter of Leynart’s heels on the stone floors of the kitchen quarters led him on, and Caris ran lightly, dodging through the big house, knowing the boy was infected already and that he must touch him, must seize him...
He heard the boy cry out, “My lord!” like a sob, and burst through the green servants’ door into the hall, where Pharos stood among his sasenna and his guards, tiny, glittering, an evil, jeweled doll. His head snapped around at the sound of Leynart’s voice, and Caris saw Pellicida beside him, half a head taller, like a crumpled-looking hoyden in her tweed cloak and plain gown with her hair in black handfuls over her shoulders.
Leynart halted for an instant, the poisoned rose still in his hand, as sasenna closed in on Caris from both sides. As his arms were seized and his sword wrenched from his hand, Caris shouted, “My lord, don’t let him near you!” and Pharos’ pale eyes narrowed.
His mouth trembling, Leynart’s eyes darted from Caris to Pella again. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He almost spat the words. “You’d like even to take my gifts away from him and most of all the gift of my heart, which he’s always had...” High heels clicking on the polished floor, he walked forward, like a golden image in his buttercup coat, the rose in his hand. His childlike blue eyes were on Pharos. “Please, my lord, if you must send me away, at least take this, to remember me...”
“It’s poisoned, Leynart,” said Pella quietly.
The boy stopped, his eyes slitting. “You’re lying, you frumpy bitch.”
But she was sasennan now, not a girl uncertain of Court usages, and the insult slid off her without breaking her serene battle calm. “I wish it were a lie,” she said in her deep, husky voice, “because I don’t want to see you hurt. But you were tricked. Cerdic was tricked. The rose is imbued with a spell to cause smallpox.”
There was a sharp stir, a murmur and a drawing back of Pharos’ red-clothed retainers. Pharos himself blanched and backed hastily toward the door.
“You believe her!” Leynart’s eyes flooded with tears of rage. “You’d cast me off on her say so!” He whirled on Pella. “If it is you’ll never live to have him!” he cried, and flung himself at the girl.
In the split second of confusion, Caris kicked the ankle of the man on his right, jabbing back with his elbow to break his balance, and whirled to snap kick his other captor in the gut. He shouted “NO!” and sprang at Leynart, hands reaching, knowing there was no way he could stop the boy.
In a single fluid movement, Pella had her heavy tweed cloak free of her shoulders and tossed it over Leynart’s head. The boy let out a shriek of rage and clawed at the thick fabric as Pella stepped aside, holding a corner of the cloak to further entangle him; the next second Caris caught the muffled figure and foot-swept him to the floor. Leynart ceased struggling almost at once. Under the stifling layers of capes, Caris could feel the slim body shaken with sobs, through which the boy gasped, “Liars! Liars!”
From the safety of the door, the Regent said, “Take him away. Let him be confined in one of the best bedrooms...”
“I’d suggest the state bedroom, your Grace,” Pella said quietly. “It was where he put the rose originally for you to find.”
Other sasenna helped Leynart to his feet, taking care not to touch more than the entangling folds of Pella’s cloak. The boy shook his head free, raven curls matted around his face, and tears of bitter frustration tracking the powder on his face with streaks of melting blue. As they led him to the door, he braced his feet and looked back at Pharos, who still hovered in the doorway behind his bodyguards. “My lord, if it’s true, I knew nothing of it,” he choked. “I—I only wanted your love. You have to believe that.”
“If it is true,” Pharos said with unwonted gentleness, “I fear that the reason will not much matter, my Ley. If it was false...” His pale eyes slid sidelong to Pella close beside Caris. The calm of battle was wearing off her and embarrassment taking over, her brownish skin stained with a blotchy red blush. But she met the Regent’s eyes squarely, a warrior, not a confused Princess trying to make herself something she was not.
After a long moment, Pharos asked, “Do you hate me, child?” He spoke as if there was no one else in the room.
“I don’t know,” Pella said frankly. “You’re the ruler and my husband ...and generally, I don’t hate people. Even if I did,” she added honestly, “I wouldn’t say so in public.” Then she blushed even hotter, realizing the gaucherie of comparing her own manners with his.
But aft
er a quick flicker of irritation, the Regent’s sinful eyes smiled. “Then I shall take an opportunity to ask you the question in private, my little Princess.” And as he stepped forward to kiss her hand, Caris faded silently out of the room.
“It has to be there,” said Antryg quietly, raising his chin from his elbows, which were crossed over his knees. He had been sitting in much the same folded-up position in one of the crude wooden chairs in the watchroom of the Silent Tower when Joanna had fallen asleep beside the hearth—hours ago, by the grayish quality of the light. That he’d gotten up in that time she knew; the fire had been replenished, and his cloak lay over her like a dilapidated purple horse blanket. But she hadn’t heard him. Weariness that she had carried all the way north crushed her, far more than a few hours’ sleep would dispel. Like the bitter cold, it had eaten into her bones, and she wondered if she would ever recover from it.
They had found nothing in the Citadel ruins, nothing but the abominations, hiding deep in the dead ends of such of the underground labyrinth as had survived the wizards’ wrath and the attenuated dreams of an evil long calcined to nothing. Not even the Church’s sasenna watched the place now; they had long deserted the Silent Tower to the darkness of its memories. And so at last, as the day grew colder with the turning of noon and a thin, dry snow began to fall, they had come to the Silent Tower, the only shelter in all the bitter hills.
“All the signs point to it,” Antryg went on. “It isn’t just that the energy of the lines was flowing to the south to Kymil—dammit, Joanna, it’s the only place it could have been flowing! I felt it, I knew it was going there! It’s other things as well.”
She sat up under his cloak, pulling the thick wool around her shoulders, though the watchroom, built into the thickness of the wall off the arched passage of the tower gate, was warm now. On the hearth she saw a tin teakettle and a big pewter tankard which had evidently been pressed into service as a teapot; an earthenware cup rested on the table near Antryg’s chair, though no steam rose now from its long-cold contents. He had refused to enter the Tower itself. Though the Sigil of Darkness had weeks since been removed from its door and taken back to the Bishop’s treasure house, the walls of the Tower were still thick with spells that prevented the working of magic—thick too, she thought, with evil memories.
Throughout the day, Antryg had been silent. In his eyes she still saw the darkness of the garden at Devilsgate and the blinding refulgence of the elemental springing to life, clothed in the lightning he’d given it to destroy those whose only defense was metal swords. The memory lay on him like the brown scar left by the Sigil of Darkness that marked his throat among his tattered shirt ruffles, but it was a pain that it would take more than a carbide hacksaw to remove.
He went on, “It’s the logical place for it, you know. Yes, the Church has watched it from a distance, but seldom closely, I’ll wager. Everyone else would have shunned it. And though there were abominations near the Tilrattin node in the north, they weren’t anything near as plentiful as there.”
“That’s because the woods wouldn’t concentrate them like the pits did,” Joanna pointed out.
“Even given that,” he insisted, “there are still more—many times more. I never felt—easy—going to look for it elsewhere. Everything points to the old Citadel. It has to be there. I know it. I feel it.”
Joanna pushed aside her backpack, which she’d been using for a pillow, and poked at the rock-hard jerky and waybread Antryg had dug from what remained of the guardroom stores. “That’s neither here nor there,” she said reasonably. “We’ve looked twice, and it’s not.”
“Neither here nor there,” the wizard repeated ironically, leaning back in his rickety chair and hugging his knees again. “From here to Tilrattin and back—from your world to mine—neither here nor there...” He paused, his gray eyes suddenly sharpening behind his spectacles; then he sat up straight, unfolding his long legs to the floor. “Neither here nor there!”
His eyes met Joanna’s. For a time the silence in the guardroom was so intent that the silken whump of the log crumbling in the hearth sounded loud and individual beneath the chaotic drone of the wind in the passage of the gates outside. Doubtfully, Joanna said, “A—a vest-pocket dimension?”
His eyes widened. “You know of such things?”
“They’re in all the comic books.”
“Actually, a sort of enclave between universes, like a bubble in the fabric of the Void. They sometimes occur, but they’re fairly short-lived because the movement of the Void pulls them apart. But now that I think of it, your universe and mine have been in phase for a long time, and certainly energy is being drained from both.”
“Could he make something like that? Or find it?”
“Found, probably, and is shielding in some fashion to keep the dimensions together indefinitely and to keep me from being aware of it.” He leaned forward, and the grief that had haunted him for the last twenty-four hours faded from his eyes in the daft glow of a theorist’s enthusiasm. “You see, I’m the only person I know who can ‘cast through’ the Void—see things on the other side, touch its fabric with my mind. Suraklin never could; though he can cross it at will, he has no sense of how the Void operates. It is actually a rather specialized field of knowledge. Many wizards have them, some of them completely useless, like the ability to summon frogs or sculpt the wind. But all the same...”
“Could you find it?”
He shook his head. “That’s the trouble. Before I can see through the spells of unseeing that guard it, I’d need to know what it looked like, know its shape and boundaries, even as I have to know what the Gate to it looks like before I can see it. And, of course, such things exist only in Suraklin’s mind.”
Joanna looked up at him, feeling inside her such a blaze of illumination that she wondered her flesh didn’t glow. Her voice was not quite steady as she said, “No they don’t.” With shaking fingers, she reached out and touched her grubby backpack. “If he’s programming it, he can’t do it in patterns—only linearly. And I’ve found graphics programs in here, mathematical equations that translate into three-dimensional shapes—or four-dimensional ones. The human mind can’t really picture a four-dimensional shape, but a computer doesn’t give a damn whether a thing is supposed to be able to exist or not...”
“Rather like wizards,” Antryg mused, “or madmen. Are all computers insane?”
Joanna hesitated, disturbed by the question for reasons she’d preferred not to examine, and the wizard went on, “Can you graph those equations? Give me a picture of it?”
She nodded, shivering all over with suppressed excitement. “It’s really only reverse engineering. I’ll need graph paper.”
“There’s paper in the Tower. Lines can be drawn on it.”
“It’ll take a hell of a long time. If I’d known I’d have brought my calculator...”
“I had a set of calculating bones—little slips of ivory about the size of your finger with numbers on them. They’re probably still up there. A mathematician in Mellimane showed me how to use them. They work very quickly.”
He got to his feet, collected his cloak from around her shoulders, and started for the watchroom door. Then he stopped, came back to her, and seized her in a fierce hug of mingled joy and desperation, his face pressed against her hair. Her arms went around his waist, being careful of the rib he’d cracked during his encounter with the Dead God. For a long moment, they stood so, while she thought, This is going to be it. We’re really going to have to deal with Suraklin this time. The thought left her weak with dread.
Then he was gone, striding across the courtyard in the failing light with all his old gawky insouciance, the snowy wind whipping his cloak and coat skirts into lunatic billows about his thin form and fraying at his long gray hair. Watching him go, Joanna felt a stab of grief and the burn of tears behind her eyes; for all his height, his loose-limbed strength, and his scatterbrained cheerfulness, it came to her how fragile he seemed. She understood,
suddenly, Suraklin’s obsessive desire to preserve the things in his life as they were, to hold to those joys no matter who else suffered for them, and to keep the taste of them on the tongue, so they would not slide away into the fast-flowing darkness of time. She forced the feeling down, telling herself, One thing at a time. Caris was right. There were some times when it did not pay to think too much.
Shaken inside, she sat down by the hearth again and began digging through the DARKMAGE files for the four-dimensional equations whose significance she hadn’t understood and whose importance, at the time, had seemed to her to be neither here nor there.
It was long past dark when Caris returned to the Silent Tower. Had he not been mageborn and able to see in the dark, he doubted he could have found it at all, for not even stars pierced the black sheet of clouds that covered the sky from horizon to horizon. To his mage’s sight, the Tower loomed queerly against the ebon backdrop, black within black, utterly untouched by light. The wind had risen, driving the hard little pellets of snow like a sandstorm against his cheeks; the cold ate through his tunic, jacket, and cloak as if he had worn nothing but a thin shirt of cotton lawn. Nevertheless, he circled the Tower twice, observing the ground and the walls, seeking for a sign. It was only when he climbed the rear wall with the hook and line of the standard sasenna’s equipment which he’d gotten from Pella that he saw the blue glow of witchlight from the watchroom’s slit windows and the faint shiver of heat above the chimney, before the wind whirled the smoke away.
If they were here, he thought, they had not found Suraklin at the Citadel after all. His heart turned sick inside him. Another time of search, then; how many more weeks of forcing himself to be what he no longer was, of warming himself at a revenge that had grown cold, and of waiting to die?
But it would have been worse, he knew, to have returned and found them not there.
His feet made no more noise than did his shadow as he crossed the court. He stood in a lee angle of the gatehouse passage and listened until he heard Antryg’s deep, beautiful voice before slipping up to the door. Before he could raise his hand to knock, he heard Antryg say within, “Ah, there’s Caris.” There was the scrape of a chair, and the door opened to the cool brilliance of witchlight and the warmth of the fire. Caris reflected that there were times when he wanted to hit the wizard up alongside the head with the hilt of his sword.
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