The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  From the darkness on the opposite side of the Yard, Caris heard the crack of a pistol.

  Thirle rocked back sharply at the impact of the bullet, his feet flying out from under him as he flopped grotesquely on the stones. A dark shape broke cover from the shadows on the opposite side of the court, running toward Thirle, toward the mouth of Stinking Lane behind him, a black cloak covering him like a wing of shadows. All this Caris watched, but all of it, including the fact that he knew Thirle was dead, was less to him than his grief for the loss of his magic. None of it mattered—none of it had anything to do with him. But deep within him shock and horror stirred—at what was happening and at himself.

  In a daze of anger, he forced himself to run, to intercept that fleeing black figure. He’d gone two steps when the digging bite of the cobbles on his bare feet reminded him belatedly that he had neither boots nor weapons. Cursing the carelessness and stupidity that seemed to be upon him tonight, he flung himself to one side into the black pocket of shadow between the novices’ house and Thirle’s. From across the court, he caught the flash of a pistol shot.

  Splinters of brick exploded from the corner of the house, so close to his face that they tore his cheek. He knew it would take his man some moments to reload and knew he should dart out and take him then—but he hesitated, panic he had never known clutching at his belly. He heard feet pounding the cobbles and forced himself to stumble upright, to race in pursuit, but his legs dragged as if tangled in wet rope. It meant nothing to him. His soul had turned as sterile and cold as the magicless world around him. It would be easier to stop now, shrug, and go back to bed—Thirle’s body would still be there in the morning. Dully angry at himself, he made himself run. For five years, in spite of exhaustion, occasional illness, and injuries, he had made himself pick up the sword for training, but forcing himself now was more difficult than it had ever been. In some oblique corner of his mind, he wondered if this were a spell of some kind, but it was unlike any spell he had ever known.

  His steps slowed. The fugitive leaped over Thirle’s body and vanished into the utter blackness of Stinking Lane. Caris dodged sideways, pressing against the house wall and slipping forward to the corner, knees flexed, ready to drop if that hand with its pistol appeared around the edge. The two shots had been so close together that the killer must have had two weapons—both empty now— and possibly he had a third. Through Caris’ thin shirt, he felt the roughness of the coarse-plastered wall and the dampness that stuck the thin fabric to his ribs with sweat. He found he was exhausted, panting as if he had run miles.

  He reached the mouth of the lane and looked around.

  He saw nothing. No light—no walls—no sky. There was only a black and endless hollow, an abyss that seemed to swallow time itself, as if not only the world, but the universe, ended beyond the narrow band of pallid moonlight that lay on the cobbles beneath his feet.

  Terror tightened like a garrote around his throat. He had not felt that hideous, nightmare fear since he had waked in the night as a small child to see the gleam of rats’ eyes winking at him in the utter dark of the loft where he slept. Staring into that emptiness of endless nothing, he felt horror pressing upon him, horror of he knew not what—the whisper of the winds of eternity along his uncovered bones. He pressed his face to the stone of the wall, squeezing his eyes shut, unable to breathe. He felt in danger, but his training, like his magic, had deserted him; he wanted to run, but knew not in which direction safety would lie. It was riot death he feared—he did not know what it was.

  Then the feeling was gone. Like a man dreaming, who feels even in sleep the refreshing storm break the lour of summer heat, he felt the hideous weight of hopelessness lift from him. Still pressed to the chill stone of the wall, Caris felt as if he had waked suddenly, his heart pounding and his breathing erratic, but his mind clear. His magic—that trace of intense awareness that all his life had colored his perceptions—had returned. With it came a moment’s blinding fury at himself for being so child-simple as to wander abroad unarmed and barefoot.

  His knees felt weak at the thought of what he knew he must do. It took all his will to force himself to move forward again, crouching below eye level though he knew that the man with the pistols was gone. It was the Way of the Sasenna never to take chances.

  Cautiously, he peered around the corner into the alley.

  Filtered moonlight showed him the moss-furred cobbles, the battered walls of the houses, and the glitter of noisome gutter-water in the canyon of dark. There was a puddle right across the mouth of the lane, too wide to jump, but there were no prints on the other side.

  Caris turned back to where Thirle lay like a beached and dying whale in the silver wash of the faint starlight. Lights were going up in the houses around the Yard, and voices and footsteps made a muffled clamor on the edges of the darkness. As he reached Thirle’s side, Caris saw the dark glitter that covered all the breast of his robe. With a gutteral gasp, the fat man’s body twitched, lungs sucking air desperately. Caris fell to his knees beside him, and for one moment the dark, frantic eyes met his.

  Then Thirle whispered, “Antryg,” and died.

  “The police must be fetched.”

  The Archmage Salteris Solaris, kneeling beside Thirle’s body, made no reply to the words of the skinny old sword-master, who stood in the little cluster of men and women, Old Believers and novices, all clutching bedclothes about them and looking down at the body with the wild eyes of those startled by gunshots from sleep. Caris, kneeling beside him, looked from the corpse’s eyes, staring blindly now at the faint pearliness of false dawn visible between the crowding black angles of the roofs, to the thin, aquiline features of his grandfather. The old man’s white brows were pinched down over the bridge of his nose, “and there was grief in his eyes for the loss of one he had known for so many years—grief and something else Caris could not understand. The old man glanced up at the crowd behind them and said “Yes—perhaps.”

  The Lady Rosamund, standing fully dressed even to the hyacinth stole of a Council member—a mark of rank that the Archmage seldom wore—sneered. As the scion of one of the noblest houses in the land, she had little use for such bourgeois institutions as the Metropolitan Police. “The constables will find some reason to wait until light to come.”

  Salteris’ thin mouth twitched in a faint smile. “Very likely.” He looked back down at the plump heap of black robes. In the soft glow of bluish witchlight that illuminated the scene, hanging like St. Elmo’s fire above his high, balding forehead and flowing white hair, the muscles of his lean jaw tightened.

  Something twisted inside Caris, and he put out a hand to touch the old man’s square, slender shoulder in comfort, but he remembered that he was sasenna and stopped himself with the gesture unmade. He was used to death, as the sasenna must be. He had killed his first man at fifteen; the schools of the sasenna were given prisoners condemned to die by the Emperor or the Church, for even in peacetime, they said, the sword blade must learn the taste of flesh. As the sworn weapon of the Council of Wizards, he would have cut Thirle’s throat himself, had they ordered it. But still, it had been many years since anyone he had known personally had died. A little to his shame, he found that the training had not changed that shocked grief of loss, and anger stirred in him that anyone would cause the Archmage pain.

  Salteris stood up, his black robes falling straight and heavy around his thin form. For all his snow-white hair, for all the worn fragility that had begun to come over him in the last few years, he took no hand to help him. “We should get him inside,” he said softly. He looked over at the two sasenna who had been on patrol duty that night. When they opened their mouths to protest that they had been in the alleys on the far side of the Yard, he waved them quiet. “It was no one’s fault,” he said gently. “I believe Thirle was killed only because he was in the man’s way as he fled—perhaps because Thirle saw him and would give the alarm.”

  “No,” a cracked, thin old voice said from the dar
kness of Stinking Lane. “You forgot about the Gate—the Gate into the Darkness—the Gate of the Void...”

  Salteris’ head turned sharply. Caris stepped forward in a half-second of reflex, readying himself to defend his grandfather, then relaxed once more as he recognized the voice. “Aunt Min?”

  From the shadows of Stinking Lane, the bent form of the old lady who had once been known throughout the Council as Minhyrdin the Fair hobbled determinedly, her black robes coming untucked from her belt and dragging in the puddles, her workbasket with its everlasting knitting dangling haphazardly at her side. Half-exasperated, half-concerned for the old lady, Caris hurried forward to take her fragile arm.

  “You shouldn’t be up and about, Aunt Min. Not tonight...”

  She waved the remark fussily away and twisted her head on her bent spine to look up at Salteris and Lady Rosamund, who had also come to her side. “There is evil abroad,” she piped. “Evil from other worlds than this. Only a curtain of gauze separates us from them. The Dark Mage knew...”

  Salteris held up his hand quickly against that name, his silky white brows plunging together. Caris glanced quickly from him to Aunt Min, who had returned to fussing with the trailing strands of her knitting, and then back. “Other worlds?” he asked worriedly. His eyes went unwillingly to the dark maw of the alley, an uneven agglomerate of dim stone angles, with the gutter picking up the quicksilver light of the sky like a broken sword blade. “But—but this is the world. There is no other. The Sun and Moon go around us...”

  Salteris shook his head. “No, my son,” he said. “They’ve known for years now that it is we who go around the Sun, and not the Sun around us, though the Church hasn’t admitted it yet. But that is not what Aunt Min means.” He frowned unseeing for a moment into the distance. “Yes, the Dark Mage knew.” His voice sank to a whisper. “As do I.” He put his arm around the old lady’s stooped shoulders. “Come. Before all else, we must get him inside.”

  They sent one of the night-watch sasenna—the only two sasenna to be dressed—for a physician. Rather to Caris’ surprise, it was less than a half-hour before he arrived. In the low-roofed closeness of the Archmage’s narrow study, Caris was telling Salteris, Lady Rosamund, and old Aunt Min of what he had seen—the pistol-shots, the chase, the terrible Gate of Darkness—when he heard the swift tap-tap of hooves in the Yard and the brisk rattle of what sounded like a gig. He was surprised that any citizen of Angelshand would come to the Mages’ Yard during the dark hours, and even more so when the man entered the study. He had expected Salteris to send for a healer of the Old Believers, whose archaic faith was still more than a little mixed with wizardry. But the man who entered wore the dapper blue knee breeches and full-skirted coat of a professional of the city.

  “Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag.” Salteris rose from the carved ebony chair in which he had been sitting, extending a strong, slender hand. The physician took it and inclined his head, his bright blue eyes taking in every detail of that small room, with its dark ranks of books, its embryos bottled in honey or brandy, and its geometric models and crystal prisms.

  “I came as quickly as I could.”

  “There was no need for haste.” Salteris gestured him to the chair that Caris brought silently up. “The man was killed almost at once.”

  One of Skipfrag’s sparse, sandy eyebrows tilted sharply up. He was a tall man, stoutish and snuff-colored, with his hair tied back in an old-fashioned queue. In spite of the fact that he must have been wakened by Salteris’ messenger, his broad linen cravat was neatly tied and his shirt-ruffles unrumpled.

  “Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag,” Salteris introduced. “Lady Minhyrdin—Lady Rosamund—my grandson Caris, sasennan of the Council, who witnessed the shooting. Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag, Royal Physician to the Emperor and my good friend.”

  As a sasennan should, Caris concealed his surprise. Few professionals believed in the power of wizards anymore, and certainly no one associated with the Court would admit to the belief these days, much less to friendship with the Archmage. But Dr. Skipfrag smiled, and nodded to Lady Rosamund. “We have met, I think, in another life.”

  As if against her will a slight answering smile warmed her ladyship’s mouth.

  Slumped in her chair, without raising her eyes from her knitting, Aunt Min inquired, “And how does his Majesty?”

  Skipfrag’s face clouded a little. “His health is good.” He spoke as one who remarks the salvage of an heirloom gravy boat from the wreck of a house.

  Lady Rosamund’s full mouth tightened. “A pity, in a way.” Salteris gave her a questioning look, but Skipfrag merely gazed down at his own broad white hands. She shrugged. “Good health is no gift to him. Without a mind, the man is better dead. After four years, it is scarcely likely he will reawaken one morning sane.”

  “He may surprise us all one day,” Skipfrag remarked. “I daresay his son thinks as you do.”

  At the mention of the Prince Regent, Lady Rosamund’s chilly green eyes narrowed.

  “It is about his son, in a way,” Salteris cut in softly, “that I asked you here, Narwahl. The man who was killed was a mage.”

  The physician was silent. Salteris leaned back in his chair, the glow of the witchlight gleaming above his head and haloing the silver flow of his long hair. For a time he, too, said nothing, his folded hands propped before his mouth, forefingers extended and resting against his lips. “My grandson says that he heard Thirle cry ‘No!’ at the sight of a man standing in the shadows on this side of the court—the man who shot him, fleeing to the alley across the yard. Caris did not see which house the killer stood near, but I suspect it was this one.”

  The bright blue eyes turned grave. “Sent by the Regent Pharos, you mean?”

  “Pharos has never made any secret of his hatred for the mageborn.”

  “No,” Dr. Skipfrag agreed and thoughtfully stared into the witchlight that hung above the tabletop for a moment. He reached out absentmindedly toward it and pinched it, like a man pinching out a candle—his forefinger and thumb went straight through the white seed of light in the glowing ball’s heart, the black shadows of his fingers swinging in vast, dark bars across the low rafters of the ceiling and the book-lined walls. “Interesting,” he murmured. “Not even a change in temperature.” His blue eyes returned to Salteris. “And that’s odd in itself, isn’t it?”

  Salteris nodded, understanding. Caris, standing quietly in a corner, as was the place of a sasennan, was very glad when Lady Rosamund demanded, “Why? Few believe in our powers these days.” There was bitter contempt in her voice. “They work in their factories or their shops and they would rather believe that magic did not exist, if they can’t use it to tamper with the workings of the universe for their personal convenience.”

  Softly, the Archmage murmured, “That is as it should be.”

  The deep lines around Skipfrag’s eyes darkened and moved with his smile. “No,” he said. “Most of them don’t even believe in the dog wizards, you know. Or they half believe them, or go to them in secret—the dog wizards, the charlatans, the quacks, who never learned true magic because they would not take Council vows, so all they can do is brew love-philters and cast runes in some crowded shop that stinks of incense, or at most be like Magister Magus, hanging around the fringes of the Court and hoping to get funding to turn lead into gold. Why do you think the Church’s Witchfinders don’t arrest them for working magic outside the Council vows? They only serve to feed the people’s disbelief, and that is what the Witchfinders want.

  “But the Regent...” He shook his head.

  Through the tall, narrow windows at the far end of the room, standing open in the murky summer heat, the sounds of the awakening city could now be heard. Caris identified automatically the brisk tap of butchers’ and poulterers’ wagons hastening to their early rounds, the dismal singsong of an itinerant noodle vendor, and the clatter of farm carts coming to the city markets with the morning’s produce. Dawn was coming, high and far off over the massive granite cit
y; the smell of the river and the salt scent of the harbor came to him, with the distant mewing of the harbor birds. At the other end of the table, Salteris was listening in ophidian silence. Aunt Min had every appearance of having fallen asleep.

  Skipfrag sighed, and his oak chair creaked a little as he stirred his bulk. “I was his Majesty’s friend for many years,” he said quietly. “You know, Salteris, that he was always a friend to the mages, for all he held them at an arm’s length for political reasons. He believed—else he would never have raised the army that helped you defeat the Dark Mage Suraklin.”

  Salteris did not move, but the witchlight flickered with the movement of his dark eyes, and something of his attitude reminded Caris of a dozing hound waked at an unfamiliar footfall.

  “Pharos’ hatred of you is more than disbelief,” Skipfrag went on quietly. “He blames you for his father’s madness.”

  Lady Rosamund waved a dismissive hand. “He was hateful from his boyhood and suspicious of everything.”

  “Perhaps so,” Salteris murmured. “But it is also true that, of late, the Regent’s antipathy toward us has grown to a mania. He may fear me too much to move against me openly—but it is possible that he would send an assassin.” His dark eyes went to Skipfrag. “Can you find out for me at Court?”

  The physician thought for a moment, then nodded. “I think so. I still have Pharos’ ear and many other friends there as well. I think I can learn something.”

  “Good.” Salteris got to his feet and clapped Skipfrag lightly on the arm as the big man rose, dwarfing the Archmage’s slenderness against his blue-coated bulk. Caris, hurrying before them to open the outer door, saw in the watery dawnlight outside that Thirle’s blood had already been washed from the cobbles in front of Stinking Lane; the puddles of water left by it were slimy and dismal-looking. The swordmaster and the two novices still stood on the brick steps of the novices’ house, talking quietly, all three wrapped in bedgowns, though, Caris noticed, the swordmaster had her scabbarded blade still in hand, ready for action.