The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  Joanna pulled away from the suddenly opened grip.

  “Are you all right?” The young man barely glanced at her as he spoke. In the skewed glare of the flashlight, his startlingly handsome face looked drawn with strain and exhaustion, lead-colored smudges of weariness around the tip-tilted dark eyes.

  “I think so,” gasped Joanna.

  He jerked the knife roughly against the thin skin above his prisoner’s jugular. His voice was thick with rage. “What have you done with the Archmage?”

  The kneeling man remained immobile between them, sweat shining on his face and trickling along his exposed throat. “Nothing,” he whispered. “Caris, listen...” His breath stopped with a quick, faint draw; a thread of blood started from under the blade.

  “I’ve listened to you enough, Antryg Windrose.” To Joanna, the young man said, “There’s a silk cord tied around under my belt. Take it and bind his hands.”

  “Caris, no.” The older man’s lips barely moved as he spoke. “You have to get out of here. There’s danger...”

  Joanna’s hands were moving quickly, picking apart the knots of the cord. The young man’s clothing was black, oddly reminiscent, like the curved sword stuck through his sash, of samurai or martial arts gear, though creased, torn in places, and stained with caked mud and slime. Her first thought that she had somehow been caught up in some kind of role-playing event faded when she saw that, under the torn jacket and shirt, Caris’ biceps and pectorals bore a collection of really shocking abrasions and bruises.

  She pulled the silk cord free from the crossed sword sash and leather dagger belt. “Look,” she said shakily, “thank you and all that—really, thank you very much— but could you please tell me what the hell is going on?”

  Caris’ knee dug viciously into Antryg’s back. “This man is a renegade wizard,” he said. “He has caused evils and abominations to appear; for what he has done I should kill him here and now.”

  Joanna, pausing in the act of tying Antryg’s hands, said, “HUNH?”

  “Caris, I had nothing to do with your grandfather’s disappearance.”

  “Then how do you know he disappeared?”

  “Look,” Antryg said, turning his head a little against the grip on his hair to meet his captor’s eyes. “There isn’t time for this. There is danger coming, an abomination beside which the thing you fought in the swamp is as nothing.”

  “How do you...”

  “I know it!” he insisted furiously. Then, more quietly, “Please believe me.” His long hands caught Joanna’s as she tried to put the cord around them, staying her, but without force. “I surrender to you, I’ll be your prisoner, do with me whatever you want to—but get out of here!”

  Joanna could feel his hands, where they touched hers, shaking. It didn’t prove anything; hers were still trembling from the exertion of the fight, and she didn’t currently have a knife at her throat. But in the silence that followed his words, she could feel a strange, louring threat, a dread that she had known before in the too-silent corridors of Building Six—a sense of evil, beyond anything she had encountered or could imagine. Beside that amorphous darkness, more human kinkiness and even quasi-medieval murder cults seemed oddly petty.

  She said softly, “Look, I don’t know what’s going on but—I think he’s right.”

  Caris glanced sharply at her, but only said, “Draw my sword.”

  Joanna obeyed. Whatever the scenario was, it was pretty clearly being played for keeps. There was something living and hateful in the silence that kept her from simply saying, “Count me out of this dungeon thanks,” and walking out the door. As she had at San Serano, she felt again that outside the room lay, not death, but something worse whose nature she could scarcely even conceive.

  Caris made sure the sword was ready to hand before he took the knife from his prisoner’s throat. “Get up. If you try any tricks, I swear I will feed you your own heart.”

  Antryg got to his feet, wiping the trickle of blood from his neck. The tension in him was palpable; fear, thought Joanna, yet she had no sense that he was afraid of Caris, in spite of the fact that the younger man had come within a millimeter of slitting his throat. He whispered, “Stay here,” and made a move toward the door, as if to check the corridor. Caris’ swift, small gesture with the sword halted him again, and he regarded the young warrior in irritated frustration.

  Knowing there was only one way out of this fox-goose-corn conundrum, Joanna said, “I’ll look,” though her stomach curled with dread at the thought of facing whatever might be in the corridor. Part of her insisted that this was absurd, but some deeper part, the part that had cowered in fear in the janitor’s closet at San Serano, knew that Antryg was right and that Caris was a stubborn fool not to flee from the darkness that she could sense was gathering somewhere nearby.

  Hefting the hammer that she knew would be utterly useless, she peeked around the doorframe.

  The corridor stretched away in darkness to her right, unbroken, impenetrable, and hideously ominous. To her left, she thought there were doors, and beyond them, some sense of openness, of moving air. The fear was to her right—abomination, Antryg had said. There was no sound, and she felt she would have preferred anything to that unspeakable, waiting silence.

  She ducked swiftly back into what had become a haven of safety. By the flashlight-glare, Antryg looked deathly white and Caris, his fair hair falling into his eyes, like a man grimly fighting his instinct to flee. She swallowed hard. “There’s nothing moving out there.”

  “Good,” Antryg murmured. In spite of the fact that he was officially a prisoner, he seemed to have effortlessly taken over the expedition. “Joanna, I’m going to have to ask you to douse that light, if you can.”

  Joanna, who had picked up her flashlight from where it lay on the floor behind the door, looked up at him, startled, and met only grave inquiry in his gray eyes.

  “There is a way of putting it out, isn’t there?”

  Verisimilitude? she wondered. But he was frightened—she knew it, could feel it—frightened beyond the point where any role player would forget the bounds of a non-industrial persona and simply say, Shut off the flashlight.

  Seeing the doubt in her eyes, he added, “I can see in the dark—so can Caris a little, can’t you?”

  Caris nodded—it was clearly not something that he even thought much about.

  For the first time in that bizarre sequence of events, Joanna felt that she had just stepped off an edge somewhere, into waters deeper than she knew. Up until that moment, she had been sure, not of what was happening, but of the kind of thing it must be. Now for the first time, she doubted, and the doubts opened an abyss of possibilities whose mere existence would have been terrifying, had she believed in them. Later, she told herself again. Shouldering her heavy purse, she took a hesitant grip on the belt loop of Antryg’s jeans and switched off the light.

  Darkness swooped down upon her like a terror-bird. Her instinct was to shrink against someone for the reassurance that she was not alone, but Antryg had twice tried to strangle her, had kidnapped her from Gary’s house, and brought her to this place. She knew she could not afford to tie up Caris’ sword arm, even if he’d be chivalrous enough to let her, which she was pretty sure he wouldn’t. So she only tightened her hold on the narrow loop of denim and tried to keep her breathing steady

  Antryg’s hand touched hers and gave it a quick, comforting pat in the darkness, as if he sensed her fear; then he led the way forward, out into the haunted hall.

  To Joanna’s infinite relief, they turned left, moving swiftly and surely Once, putting out her left hand, she felt the cold, uneven stone of a wall and guessed that, see-in-the-dark or not, Antryg was probably using the wall as a guide. Caris’ shoulder brushed her bare arm, and the coarse, quilted, black cotton of the jacket was warm against her skin; she could hear the soft rustle of cloth and the creak of leather as that gorgeous young man turned periodically to look back. Once she herself risked such a glance and
wished she hadn’t.

  It’s only darkness, she told herself, the same as the darkness in front of you. Nothing is nothing. But it wasn’t. Why it should seem so dense and terrifying she did not know, nor why, seeing nothing, she should have the sense that it stirred, as if with some passing form that even light would not have unmasked. When I get out of this, she thought, wherever the hell I am, I’m taking the first bus back to Van Nuys, I am finding a new apartment, changing my telephone number, and looking for another job, if necessary...

  But Antryg knew her now. And Antryg was one of them, whoever they were. Was this, she wondered suddenly, just a put-up part of the game? Was he leading her through darkness to something worse, phase two of some elaborately choreographed nightmare?

  It was more logical than what she feared, in some far-back corner of her heart, might be going on.

  Something stirred in the darkness. A wind touched her hair, blowing from behind them—a queer, cold smell that she vaguely recognized and which filled her with unnamed terror. She glanced back over her shoulder again and thought she saw, far back in the black depths behind them, some blur of luminosity, which illuminated nothing. At the same moment Caris whispered, “Antryg...”

  Antryg’s bare, sinewy arm went around her shoulders, drawing her against him, and she felt by the movement of his body that he had shoved Caris ahead of them. He whispered, “Run!” There was a frantic fear in his voice that could not have been counterfeited; she felt, rather than saw, Caris start to run.

  She had no idea how long they ran, nor when the ground beneath her feet changed from stone to earth, and from earth to the silky drag of grass. She stumbled and was hauled forward by main force, gasping for breath and exhausted, her mind blurred by panic of whatever it was that lay behind them. Sometime in that darkness, she was aware that the graveyard fetor that had so unreasonably terrified her had changed to wind and the thick headiness of cut hay; she stumbled repeatedly on the uneven slopes of the ground, trying to match her stride with the much longer one of the man whose powerful arm pushed her inexorably on. Through her terror, she became dimly aware of a dividing horizon between dark earth and dark sky. Then she stumbled, and fell into a final and deeper darkness.

  It was just before dawn when she woke. She stirred, and sneezed. The air was thick with the fragrance of hay, with the smell of water and cows, with the twitter of whippoorwills, and with the incessant, peeping chorus of small frogs. For a blank moment, she wondered where she was. Her throat ached with bruises, and her body was stiff with the last, desperate run of the night. She was starvingly hungry.

  Looking up, she could see Antryg sitting with his back to a haystack—an object that Joanna had never seen in her life outside of pictures, but which was indubitably a haystack. His long legs were drawn up, his arms rested across his bony knees, and he contemplated the glowing eastward sky with a look of meditative calm. Beyond him, Caris lay asleep, like an exhausted god, his sword still under his limp hand.

  All around them, the world was bathed in the unearthly blue glow of predawn. Joanna sat up, scratching the straw from her hair. She felt a little cold, shaken, and very unreal. The hills behind them were still shrouded with the clear, purple darkness of the last of the night, but the waters of the marsh that lay in a series of crisscrossed hollows below them and to their left were already picking up the quicksilver brightness of the sky. There was no freeway roar, no growl of jets, not even the far-off moan of a train whistle. The sky was uncrossed by powerlines and, though it was late August, untainted by smog.

  “Are you cold?” Antryg asked her, and she shook her head.

  “Not very.”

  He smiled and touched the t-shirt he wore—black, with the silver-foil logo of last year’s Havoc concert inscribed blazing across the chest. She recognized it as belonging to Tom Bentley, the department’s would-be heavy-metal rocker. “If I’d known I might have to share, I’d have picked up something more substantial,” he apologized. Then, following her glance to the sleeping Caris, he added, “It hardly seemed fair to escape while he was asleep, at least this time. He would have stayed awake to stand over me if he could; the last twenty-four hours haven’t been his fault. In any case I wanted to see the sun rise. I haven’t seen that in a long time.”

  Without the beard that had hidden most of his face when she’d first seen him at the party, he looked, not precisely younger, but more ageless. Joanna guessed his age at about forty, though his hair—an unruly mop, even when whacked off to less than half of its former length—was faded and streaked with gray, like frost-killed weeds. Behind the spectacles, his gray eyes were intelligent, a little daft, and at the same time very gentle. In spite of the bruises on her wrists left by his grip in last night’s struggle and the crushed ache of her windpipe, Joanna felt her fear of him subside.

  “Look,” she said, sitting up cross-legged and shaking the last of the hay out of her hair. “Would it be too much to ask what the hell is going on?”

  He regarded her for a moment with wary suspicion in those wide, oddly intent eyes. “Don’t you know?”

  She sighed. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have been scared as spitless as I was last night.”.

  He folded his long hands and looked down at the twined fingers for a moment—mottled with ink, she saw, and, in the slowly growing dawnlight, very white, as if he had spent years without seeing sun. “I suspect you would have been even more so,” he said gently. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  “Where are we?” She looked around her at the silent fields and dove-colored pools. “And why have you been stalking me? What kind of crazy game was all that supposed to be last night?”

  He tilted his head to one side. “Have you been stalked?”

  “I don’t know what else to call your—your hunting me in the halls at San Serano.”

  “It is no game.” Stiffly, Caris sat up and threw a quick, resentful glance at Antryg. Sullenly, he wiped his sword on his jacket and then sheathed it with a vicious snick. Pushing his blond, rumpled hair out of his eyes, he looked over at Joanna. “It is hard for you to understand, since there is no magic in your world. But you have been brought over into our world, into the Empire of Ferryth, for what purposes I don’t know, by this man. He is Antryg Windrose, a renegade wizard, and I am sworn by my vows to the Council of Wizards to bring him to justice for the evil he has done.”

  Joanna stared at him for a long moment. “You’re crazy,” she said.

  “No, I’m crazy,” Antryg disagreed mildly. “Caris is only confused. And I’m afraid he’s right about your not being any longer in your own world. Doesn’t the mere smell of the air convince you?”

  Joanna hesitated. There were plenty of places in the San Joaquin Valley, for instance, or up north, where smog was seldom smelled—but not, she had to admit, in the summer. And in any case, if she’d been out long enough to be taken there... She dug in her purse and found her watch. The readout flashed to the touch of a button—August 30, the day after Gary’s party. She dropped it back into the general confusion of the purse and tried to make the times fit. Unless it was like one of those Mission Impossible stories in which dates had been meticulously rejiggered to convince someone it was last week or next week...

  The countryside might have been somewhere in California’s Central Valley, from what she could see of it— marshy hayfields before them, silent green hills behind, and the long brown curve of a river in the distance—except there were no mountains, not even as a far-off blue line against the sky.

  Beside her, her kidnapper and her rescuer were talking softly. The younger, in spite of his dark and battle-shabby warrior’s outfit, was handsome with the Nordic gorgeousness of a prince of fairy tales, save for a straight scar about an inch and a half long that marked a cheekbone straight out of a TV ad because it was the kind of thing that anyone could have had corrected by plastic surgery—and partly because, in spite of her guess at Caris’ age as being less than twenty-one, it looked to be several years old. The jocks
she had met had given Joanna a deep distrust of young men that good-looking, but Caris lacked the ego-centricity she had so often encountered in the self-proclaimed hunks. It was as if his appearance was entirely peripheral to some greater force that dominated his life.

  He was saying, “Why did you bring her to this world?”

  Antryg, folding his long arms comfortably around his drawn-up knees, considered the matter gravely for some moments and replied, “I can’t imagine. Perhaps Joanna could tell us? Joanna... ?”

  Annoyed, Caris caught the wizard’s shoulder as he started to turn toward her and pulled him back. “Don’t play innocent. First you murder Thirle—then you kidnap the Archmage—now this woman. I want to know why.”

  “I must admit to some curiosity about that myself,” Antryg remarked, disengaging his arm from the younger man’s crushing grip with no apparent effort. “I should imagine poor Thirle was murdered simply because he had seen the Gate through the Void—or perhaps because he saw who it was who came out.”

  “Others saw the Gate,” said Caris. “I, for one.”

  “You didn’t know what it was, nor its implications.”

  “Aunt Min did. My grandfather did.”

  “But by that time, there were other witnesses. It was not simply a matter of silencing one. Joanna my dear, why would someone—let’s call it me for talking purposes—have kidnapped you?” He turned those gentle, luminous eyes upon her. “Who and what are you?”

  “Be careful,” Caris cautioned, as Joanna drew breath to reply. “He’s completely mad, but he’s clever. He may have brought you here to learn something from you.”

  “I don’t know what,” Joanna said, looking in puzzlement from the young man’s onyx-dark eyes to the inquiring, bespectacled gray ones. “Even if he wanted a computer programmer for some reason, the woods are full of better ones than I am. But I’ve been stalked for a week or more...” She turned back to Antryg. “What were the marks you made on the walls? You made one at the house, and there was one at San Serano, the night you tried to strangle me there.”