The Silicon Mage

by Barbara Hambly

  He said dully, “It’s done. I got there in time—Leynart’s under guard, and they know about the rose.”

  Joanna looked up from the vast graph spread across the table—a bedsheet, in fact, ruled with penciled lines, on which she was marking dots in the midst of half a dozen wax scribbling tablets that were covered with mathematical formulae in the spiky little numbers her people used. “And Pella?”

  “She’s gone back to Pharos.” Caris stripped off his cloak and jacket and folded himself up beside the hearth, his arms crossed before his chest. There was hard bread and dried beef there. He realized he hadn’t eaten all day, save for a few mouthfuls of bread and ham Pella had stolen for him from the kitchen, but didn’t care.

  Joanna set down her pencil, startled and aghast. “Pharos...”

  Roughly, Caris said, “It doesn’t matter. It’s better. There was nothing for us.”

  Except joy, he thought, leaning his forehead against the stones of the hearth and closing his eyes, feeling the warmth of the fire like the brush of Pella’s fingers on the lids. Except joy.

  Behind him, Antryg said quietly, “We’ve found Suraklin.”

  “Good,” Caris mumbled. He lay down and drew his cloak over him. At least, he thought, it will then be over.

  And on that thought he slept.

  He was wakened by grief, dull and uncaring, beyond even the effort of tears. Pella was gone, and it seemed to him that even his pursuit of Suraklin was futile, a waste of his time, a fool’s errand. Opening his eyes he saw wet grayish light seeping through the watchroom windows that let into the courtyard, making the small chamber seem dim and frosty, with its stink of old smoke and wet clothes. The vast graph spread over the table was now covered with arcane lines and symbols, with scribbled marginal calculations half-hidden by tablets, by the disgorged contents of Joanna’s precious backpack, and by Antryg’s little ivory calculating bones. Under the grubby curtain of her straggling blond hair, Joanna’s face looked thin and old, as it had by the candle light of the posting houses on their journey south, ravaged by lack of sleep and weariness, the sharpness of her cheekbones and chin emphasizing the awkward nose and the shrew lines around her eyes. She was looking at the strange magic watch that was strapped to her wrist. Antryg, sitting on the bench beside her, seemed strangely subdued.

  She said quietly, “It’s nine in the morning.”

  The wizard glanced across at her, his fingers, as if idling away from his conscious thought, beginning to make a corral of his mathematical ivory bones. “There have been daylight spells before.”

  “Not on weekdays. This is Tuesday, Antryg; if Suraklin was still being Gary, he’d have to be at work. He needed to stay working so he could program on the San Serano computer. The fact that he isn’t means he’s done with that.”

  The sleep cleared from Caris’ mind, but left it still muzzy, as if he were half-drunk. He realized that his depression and grief were not solely his own. “You mean he’s gone into his computer.” He sat up, scrubbing his fingers through his cropped blond hair, wondering why it didn’t matter to him that they had lost their race with the Dark Mage.

  Joanna nodded. “I think so.” She began folding up her papers, mechanically, as she always did, like a task she was forcing herself to perform. Her eyes were dull; she looked beaten, wretched, and badly scared. “I hate to say it, guys—but I think the system just went on-line for keeps.”

  Chapter XVII

  UNDER A CUT-STEEL MORNING SKY, what was left of the Citadel of Suraklin lay cold and bleak, the puddles of slush frozen, and skiffs of hard, powdery snow blowing restlessly over ground barren now of any living thing. Save for those ghostly flurries, even the snow did not lie here, though it blotched the hills all around with white. Joanna, hugging Antryg’s patched purple cloak around her, wondered if Hell would look like this after Judgment Day—inhabitants gone, Devil destroyed, even the glamour of evil burned out of it, leaving nothing but a few lines of stones that stank of forgotten corruptions.

  Beside her, Antryg looked ghastly in the dun-colored light. “Can you feel it?” he whispered.

  Joanna nodded, though she was not certain what it was that she did feel. Her mind felt clouded, dulled with the now-familiar uncaring depression of the energy drain, but added to that was a hideous sense of wrongness, as if she might extend her hand and push it inadvertently through the structure of the universe itself.

  “He’s weakened the whole fabric,” Antryg said softly. “The enclave is being maintained from moment to moment now by the computer’s power, by the energy relays. It’s unstable; where it touches, this universe is unstable as well.” He spoke barely above a whisper, as if he feared that too loud a sound would shatter the very semblance of reality around them. Wind stirred his hair and swirled the long skirts of his coat; a foot from him, Joanna felt none.

  Something caught her eye, and she whirled, her heart in her throat. She thought she had seen something near one of the old pits, scraggly with wet stones and frozen slush, but there was nothing... or...

  Try as she would, she could not focus her eyes on the place. It was like a puzzle with pieces missing, though she could not describe what was preventing her from seeing the spaces in between.

  “Yes,” Antryg murmured. “There are abominations here.”

  “Let’s get this over.” In spite of the day’s freezing wind, a rime of sweat glittered on Caris’ face. His long sword flashed naked in his hand, cold in the daylight like a living thing; it was his eyes that seemed dead.

  “It will be in the pits.” There was no doubt now in Antryg’s deep voice. “In the bottommost room, at the center of his ancient power. It’s fairly easy to see something invisible, if you know what you’re looking for, have a picture of it, as the graphic program delineated it. My dear...”

  For an instant Joanna seriously considered giving Antryg a quick rundown on how to input programs from floppies to mainframe, then stopped herself. Experience had taught her that whatever could go wrong with a computer would, even ones that didn’t house the corroding souls of dead wizards. Though her own soul felt dead within her, she knew intellectually that she still loved this man and that he’d need her help. After several nights of little or no sleep, he looked like ten miles of bad road. If he felt anywhere near as bad as she did, he would, she told herself, need all the help he could get.

  Trying to keep the whimper of fear out of her voice, she said, “Once I program the worm in, we’ll have five or ten minutes. That’s how long it would take that program to wipe the whole Cray at San Serano—ops, systems, everything.”

  “All right.” He was glancing all around him as he spoke, his long nose pointing like a nervous dog’s, the diamonds in his earlobes flashing like nuggets of dirty ice. “That will give us time to get out before the enclave itself collapses. Presumably, you can’t tell which programs will be the first to be devoured, so there is the chance that we—won’t make it out.”

  Joanna swallowed. During the spells of deadness, she always felt anxious—the anxiety now had intensified to a wretched sense of almost-panic in which she wanted only to do whatever she had to do quickly and then run away, run to safety... She said in a tiny voice, “You mean—die?”

  His gray eyes were somber, looking down into hers. “I don’t know—but probably not. There’s a good chance,” he added carefully, “that, though the enclave will seal up once the power goes down, Suraklin won’t die. He will only exist in the enclave, unable to touch either of our worlds again, but... his consciousness may remain.”

  Joanna whispered, “Oh, swell.” No Exit, she thought: the Sartre play about the damned sealed into a room with those who understood them all too well, for all eternity.

  “So when you get your program input, I suggest you run like hell. It’s certainly what I’ll be doing.”

  She thought, I’ll never make it. Antryg, with his longer legs, might. The door would close between them, and she would be Gary’s—Suraklin’s—forever...

&
nbsp; With the hideous sensation of plunging down a limitless elevator to nowhere, she stumbled after Antryg and Caris toward the brink of the monster pit.

  “Antryg...” Caris whispered, his voice fading to nothing.

  Antryg turned his head, to follow the young man’s eyes. A ragged stringer of ground mist whirled aside, and Suraklin stood before them at the head of the broken stair.

  Joanna’s throat felt as if it had been shut with a valve.

  Whatever else Suraklin was now, he was not Gary anymore.

  It was Gary’s body, Gary’s jeans and jacket and Nikes under the black cloak of a Council wizard. Even the face, she supposed, was still Gary’s, though the expression had changed it so completely that she was no longer certain she would recognize the man she had once made love to, years ago on a hot Los Angeles night. There was nothing left of that slightly vapid, good-natured selfishness, amoral and greedy without being actively offensive to anyone. Nothing left at all. The lines of the cheeks and around the brown eyes with their queer golden luster were the lines of age, age infused by driving will and a single overmastering purpose.

  Suraklin smiled, like something wound with a key. “Antreges.” His voice, nothing like Gary’s now, softened the hard g of Antryg’s name into a diminutive, the name of the boy he had known. “Like the windrose on a map, you point in all the directions of the wind—but I did suspect you’d finally point your way back here, to your home, to me. Babe...” His eyes touched Joanna, the nickname turning her stomach. “Do you think, if I can make a roulette wheel stop on red or summon lightning, I can’t degauss a disk? You’re just not thinking, babe...” As Joanna gasped, sickened with shock, the brown eyes moved to Caris, the inflection of the voice shifting again. “My son.”

  The sasennan began, “You dare...”

  At the same instant, Antryg whirled utterly without warning, caught Joanna by the shoulders, and flung her to the ground. Lightning seared up like a blue-white snake striking from the earth as he dived on top of her. Caris, his breath and attention momentarily diverted in anger, wasn’t so quick. The lightning flung him a dozen feet, its earsplitting crack drowning his final cry. It was over before Antryg had time to react. Her face in the dust, her nostrils filled with ozone and the stink of burned flesh, Joanna was still nearly blinded by an explosion of light that seemed to ignite the very air. She felt Antryg spring to his feet and wisely stayed where she was; his coat skirt brushed her face briefly and that soft, flexible voice whispered, “Get under cover and keep hold of the backpack.” Then he was gone, his footsteps thudding through the ground in her ear.

  Even faced with death, the effect of the energy drain made her want to stop and argue—the backpack was too heavy, the disk it contained was now useless, Suraklin had said so...

  Do it by the numbers, she told herself fiercely. They’d been standing near a shallow subsidence. She rolled over and over, nearly blinded through her shut eyelids. The ground dropped away beneath her and broken masonry dug into her ribs through her heavy coat as she skidded down. The searing white glare seemed to sicken and purple; raising her head a little, she could see Suraklin with his head down, squinting against the light. Antryg, sword in hand, was within thirty feet of him by the time the Dark Mage could see enough to use the implement he had whipped out from beneath his cloak.

  Quite sensibly, somewhere along the line, Suraklin had acquired a submachine gun.

  Joanna had to clamp her hands over her mouth to keep from screaming. Antryg flung himself down, sliding and rolling, his sword screaming in a steel arc toward Suraklin’s ankles. Bullets stitched the dust in front of him. He jerked and twisted like a cat flung in water, diving for the minimal cover of a broken wall; the glaring, unnatural light faded as he let the spell slip from his mind. It had served its purpose, but he had been just too late.

  “Really, my dear,” Suraklin said, amused. “You used to be quicker than that.”

  “Old age comes to us all.” Antryg was moving already, flattened to the single broken course of stones, though Joanna thought his voice still seemed to come from where he had first gone to ground. He’d done voice-throwing, she remembered, as one of his dog-wizard tricks to earn supper when they’d first traveled the post road from Kymil to Angelshand during the summer. Behind the truncated wall, there wasn’t much of anyplace to go, but already she could see the dead weeds around the place begin to smoke and wither as if under blasting heat.

  “Not to me, my love. Never to me.”

  Antryg had reached the limit of the wall. He lay crushed to the ground, to keep from Suraklin’s line of sight. Joanna could see blood black on the dull green of his coat sleeve, the sweat of concentration beading his face. “No,” he said. “Nor youth, either, nor warmth, nor cold. Don’t you understand yet what you’ve done to yourself?”

  The snout of the gun never wavered from the wall. The bare ground was blackening there, the dead weeds starting to smoke inches from Antryg’s feet. A counterspell, Joanna guessed, held the burning at bay, but for how long?

  “Indeed I do. What you see is only what our little Joanna would call a waldo, operated by my mind at a distance. Now that I’ve taken steps to put Pharos out of the way for good, I’ll have plenty of them. Cerdic will see to that. But the mind is not in any of them. I have made myself immortal.”

  “You have made yourself like the Dead God.”

  Suraklin’s brows came together, his voice sharp. “Nonsense!”

  “The Dead God isn’t immortal,” Antryg pressed. “The Dead God is dead. Without feeling, without caring, even for himself—without changing. More stagnant than the very stones, which transmute from rock to air and sand. What do you have, Suraklin, that makes you want to continue? As a computer, as a metal thing of electricity and knowledge, what do you want? Are you Suraklin anymore? Or have you become like Joanna’s Xerographs, a fourth-generation copy of what you once were, with each copy a little less legible than the last, a little more mixed in with other peoples’ minds? What is deathlessness on those terms?”

  Around her, Joanna was conscious of the smell of dust, rising from the ground as if blown by imperceptible wind. She fought to stifle a choke, but found the air increasingly thick with it, grayish, stifling, clogging her breathing and burning her eyes. A gust of wind cleared it a little. Through it, she saw Antryg’s face taut with concentration, fighting the spell of the dust’s suffocation. The heat around the wall was still intense; she could feel it, even at this distance, on the unsteady wind. A computer is capable of millions of operations per second; she wondered how many subroutines constituted a spell, and how many spells could be maintained by a computer as opposed to a man.

  “I was in the Silent Tower for years, Suraklin,” Antryg went on. “I risked death to win my freedom. But you have walled yourself into a tower from which there is no escaping.”

  Suraklin laughed. “Are you tired, my love? You’re older than I am, now ...Trying to talk me into surrender, when you know you cannot defeat me by magic? I suggest you save your breath—I can outlast you, you know. Entropy always wins. I will still be here, waiting for you, when your concentration begins to crack from starvation or weariness—just how many spells can you hold off? Shall we see?”

  Antryg’s hand moved, flinched as if with sudden cramp; Joanna saw his face contort with pain. The wind faltered, the dust almost suffocating her. A moment later something stirred in the thick grayness, like a whirlwind rising from a slush pool between the buckled pavement of the old court, droplets of slime shivering into the air, half-forming into the shape she recalled from the electric darkness of the Devilsgate garden. The countering wind died. Through a curtain of silt, she saw Antryg gather himself together for a rush that would take him under the muzzle of the waiting gun.

  Then she saw Caris move. His face was white where it wasn’t smeared with mud, twisted with pain, but the hand that held his .45 was completely steady. Suraklin turned his head in the same instant that Antryg yelled, “NO!” With a shattering
crack of flame the gun blew up in Caris’ hand.

  Caris screamed, doubling his body over the ruined bone and bleeding flesh; Antryg was already moving. One sword stroke severed Suraklin’s right hand where it held the Beretta’s trigger before the Dark Mage could bring the gun back to bear on him. At the same moment, Antryg backfisted the Dark Mage across the face with his other hand, sending him staggering back. Suraklin swung around, as if blood weren’t pouring from the stump of his right arm and his shattered nose, and with the heavy lock of the gun, still clutched by the left handgrip, cracked Antryg across the temple.

  Antryg fell to his knees, a yard from the edge of the chasm that had been the Citadel vaults. Before he could raise his sword again, Suraklin swept the spouting stump of his arm through the air, and the blood itself whirled—red, hideous, multiplying—into the form of an elemental that plunged down on Antryg in a reeking wave.

  White light stabbed like a laser beam from Antryg’s bony fingers as he sprang back. The elemental dissolved before it in a torrent of flying gore, even as the pit edge gave and crumbled under Antryg’s boots. He tried to catch himself, but Suraklin was upon him, wreathed now in fire, his single hand weighted with the gun flashing through the air to crack like an iron club on the side of Antryg’s skull.

  Antryg clutched at the brittle weeds on the edge as he went over; then even his shabby half-gloved hand slithered from sight.

  Blood streaming from his severed arm, Suraklin stood looking down into the pit. “That was very foolish, my darling,” he said. Joanna’s heart lurched into beating again—Antryg had to be holding onto some projection, some ledge, not too far down the abyss. He was alive—and just for the moment she wasn’t going to have to cope with the Dark Mage alone.