Gently leading him, Antryg looked up at him and asked, “What?”
The Prince paced a few steps, then turned back again, some of the tension easing out of his body with a kind of hopeless inner surrender. When he spoke again, his voice was deliberately matter-of-fact. “About three months ago, I fell in love with a boy in the household of the Duke of Albrete—an enchanting youth, amber and alabaster, with skin so clear you could trace the path of a swallow of wine down his throat. Elfwith was his name—not that it matters, and I certainly didn’t expect to remember it three months afterward. I probably wouldn’t, except for what happened to him.” He stilled in his pacing and swallowed again, looking down at Antryg, who sat unmoving at the base of the pillar, the tawny light playing restlessly across his absurd, bespectacled face.
“He—died. I’d asked him to go up to my rooms and given orders for the guards in the secret staircase to let him pass—even the secret stair into the room is guarded. I was delayed by a matter of state—those wretched ambassadors from Senterwing about that brainless bitch I’m to marry. All very secret.”
Antryg nodded. Joanna remembered, sometime on the carriage journey, Caris saying the wizard had read that marriage in a spread of cards. She felt very little surprise, even in the face of what she knew about the Prince’s preferences, in hearing that it was true.
“Well, Elfwith came hurrying down to the guard on the secret stair, saying he thought there was someone in my rooms. They turned out and searched, they said—I heard all this later—but there was no sign of anyone having been there. So Elfwith went in to wait. And I found him, an hour and a half later, dying—dying horribly in my bed, his limbs covered with sores, eaten with them. If it was a sickness, it was nothing Narwahl had ever seen, but he claimed there was no poison that could do it, either. I swore him on his life to secrecy, because there was the boy’s family to consider as well. Of course the bedding was all burned, but there was no other case of such a sickness ever reported anywhere, before or since. I know that, for Narwahl looked in every book and journal he possessed.
“Then—it might have been two weeks later—I was sleeping...”
“Alone?” Antryg inquired, and Pharos managed an ironic smirk.
“You don’t think I ever let myself fall asleep in the presence of those stupid little creatures, do you? I send them away. Lately I’ve kept Kanner in my room when I sleep, though I didn’t do so then. He’s very loyal to me. He was sasennan until he lost his hearing through a fever. I know that, when sasenna become flawed, they’re supposed to kill themselves, I suppose he’s added the flaw of cowardice to that of deafness, but I’ve made it worth his while. I find having a deaf servant supremely useful. In any case, I woke up—I don’t know why—it might have been a dream. I dream...”
He paused again, then visibly shied from the subject, like a nervous horse, and resumed his pacing. His gestures, repeated in vast, amorphous shadows on the wall at his back, moved as if they would shape the scene from air. “The bed curtains were open a little, and I could see part of the paneling of the wall by the light of the night lamp. There was a shadow on it, clearly thrown, but huge, distorted—the long robe of a mage. I saw him move his hand, doing something at the lamp table I thought. I cried out for the guards; but when they came in—nothing. There was no one there, nor was there a way he could have left; the corner he was in is near the outside wall, and there was no possibility of a secret passage, even if I had not had the room sounded a dozen times. I had the water in the pitcher that stood on that table given to one of the palace dogs. It seemed all right at the time, but the dog died four, five days later. Too long for poison, much too long. And yet...”
He pressed his hand to his mouth again, a nervous gesture, to still or to hide the unsteadiness of those too full, painted lips. “I couldn’t tell anyone after that, you see,” he went on, a little thinly. “There was no proof. They would have mocked me if I’d said I thought it was magic, as they mocked me when...”
He caught himself up again, over some old memory, and went hastily on, “They would have said I was mad, as they did before. And I am mad. But not—not mad in that way. Not until now. Twice I’ve waked in the night and heard knocking somewhere in the room—it’s vanished when I called the guards; and after the second time, I had Kanner in the room with me and at least one other guard. I don’t even know whether I really heard it the second time or not—I was dreaming—I don’t know.”
He ran his hands through his barley-gold hair, twisting the careful curls awry; in the firelight, the muscles of his long, narrow jaw quivered with the violence of their compression.
“I fought against it for a long time,” he said at length. “I did not believe in magic, but—I think someone is trying to kill me through its use. Is this possible?”
He turned back to look at Antryg, hungry desperation in his eyes.
After a long moment, the mage nodded. With a movement oddly graceful for one so gawky, he got to his feet, still steadying himself against the pillar, and put a gentling hand on the Prince’s shoulder. “How long since the last attempt?”
“If it was an attempt,” Pharos whispered. “It was only knocking....”
“It was an attempt,” Antryg said, and there was no doubt in his voice. “How long?”
“Two—three weeks. Shortly before—shortly before the Bishop of Kymil sent word that she had uncovered a plot of the Council of Mages against the Church and against the Realm. I issued jurisdiction for their arrest. Then, two days later, Narwahl...”
As if quieting the hysterics of a child, Antryg closed his hands around the Prince’s trembling fingers. It occurred to Joanna to wonder whether Pharos had seen that attic room, sprayed with fresh blood and glass.
“And you went to Kymil?” Antryg asked, and the Prince nodded. “To find out what Herthe knew?”
“Yes.” The Prince nodded again, his voice a little stronger, a little steadier. “Herthe and her guards came and met me at the posthouse. She told me who you were. I knew then I had to find you, get to you before the Witchfinders did. I knew you were the only one who couldn’t have done it, who couldn’t possibly be in on it. She spoke of abominations in the land and said that it seemed likely you were coming to Angelshand. I made some excuse, turned back, and ordered my men to search for you, find you before the Church could have you killed. I thought you might have gone to Devilsgate, to take refuge with that stupid, saintly hypocrite Cerdic....” A flash of vicious bitterness surfaced in his voice, like the glint of paranoia that suddenly gleamed in his narrowed eyes at the mention of his cousin’s name. Antryg said nothing, and Joanna, who had been thoroughly charmed with the Regent’s cousin, likewise refrained from adding her two cents to the conversation at this point.
After a moment, the madness faded from Pharos’ eyes, and with it, his hard-held calm. He swallowed; his voice came out small and cracked with strain. “I came back here today. But it was as if—as if from the time I spoke to Herthe, the morning after I met you in the posthouse, I knew it was hopeless. It seemed to me then that I could see my whole future, and it was empty—that I was mad, like my father.” He faltered, then went on, “And in time I would become an imbecile like him. Even though these things I feared had no existence, they would destroy me, and there was nothing to do, nowhere to come, except back here to my death. I tried having the Council mages imprisoned, but the Church has its mages, too. And there’s still tonight to sleep through—”
His voice broke suddenly, as if weight had been put on a flawed beam; his breath hissed, and he stood for a moment, shivering in silence and, Joanna realized, shame at his fears.
Very gently, his hands still in the Prince’s convulsive grip, Antryg said, “Here?”
When Pharos glanced sharply at him, Antryg went on, “I take it this is the dungeon under the original part of the old Summer Palace.”
The Prince’s lips moved in a quirk that might have been a smile; he glanced down at the big hands he still held and rele
ased them. As if aware of the wreck he’d made of his coiffure, he put up one gloved hand to straighten a snail-shell curl. “Yes. I’ve taken it over for my own. It’s sufficiently isolated in the grounds to keep gossip mongers away when I want a little private sport.”
“Is there anywhere else you could sleep?”
“Would it make a difference?”
“It might,” Antryg said mildly. “If you were more superstitious, you’d probably have thought yourself of the possibility that there’s a wizard’s mark in your rooms.”
There were seven of them.
Wearing a ruffled shirt and breeches fetched by Joris from the wardrobes of the Prince’s pages (“I’m tired of walking around looking like I’ve just escaped from the cover of a historical romance!”) Joanna followed Antryg and the Prince up several flights of stairs, passing from the ancient stonework of the dungeons to the renovated rococo grace of the Prince’s palace above. It was now quite dark outside, but the Prince’s private apartments blazed with the light of a thousand candles and lamps; as they moved from room to brilliantly lit room, followed by Joris, Kanner, and two other guards, it occurred to Joanna that the Regent was probably terrified of the dark.
The warm brilliance of the candles, so different from the hard and prosaic electricity Joanna had grown up with, lent a curiously dreamlike air to those rooms, with their shell-shaped curlicues of gold and scarlet, their delicate furniture, and their sinuous marbles. In his shabby black coat, spectacles, and quizzing glass, Antryg moved through them like some daft Victorian ghost hunter, tapping at the chinoiserie of the panels and calling the marks, one by one, to faint and glowing life.
One mark, on the ancient stonework behind the paneling itself, was extremely old, readable only when Antryg pressed his hands to the painted wood. Another made him smile. “I wonder what the mage Nyellin was doing here? It’s six hundred years old—nothing to do with you, Pharos—but she did have rather a reputation as a meddler herself.”
His hand brushed the scarlet-lacquered wood between the bedroom windows. Under his fingers, another mark appeared, only to be seen from the corner of the eye—a chance glimmer of candlelight, floating, it seemed, above or below the actual surface of the panel, as if someone had scribbled with a finger on the air in light.
Joanna remembered, with an uneasy chill, the sign on the wall of the main computer room at San Serano, seen past the dark shadow of the strangler’s shoulder; she remembered also the darkness of Gary’s upstairs room and the red reflection of computer lights off Antryg’s spectacles as he’d brushed his hand, just so, along the wall by the door.
I can’t tell you the truth and I don’t wish to lie to you...
You are in this world under my protection...
“A wizard’s mark will call him to it,” Antryg explained over his shoulder to the Prince, who followed, cautious as if the marks themselves could kill. “He can find it, wherever he is, and go to it. If the mark is strong enough, he can use it to influence things near it, even when he is not present, sometimes even work certain spells through it without being there.”
He stood for a long time, staring at the paneling between the windows, where the mark had glimmered so briefly to life. Then he sighed and shut his eyes.
The Prince glanced nervously over his shoulder. “What is it?”
Antryg turned away and touched briefly the elaborate marquetry dressing table that stood beneath the mark. A branch of candles in the twining shapes of naked goddesses stood on it and beside them a pitcher of creamy, rose-colored porcelain, half-filled with water. “The mark is less than two months old,” he said quietly. He looked suddenly very tired, his mouth taut and a little white, as if he had drunk some bitter and poisoned brew. “This one—” He crossed to the door of a dressing room and brushed a faint, brief shimmer of sign from its topmost panel, “—about ten years. Both by the same wizard.”
“Who?” demanded the Prince, and Antryg shook his head.
“The second mark would reinforce the influence of the first,” he went on, staring up at the place where the mark on the door had been. “But ten years ago...” He paused, his eyebrows drawn together over the absurd beak of his nose. “Ten years...”
“What is it?”
Antryg looked back at the Prince and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “These have always been your rooms?”
“Yes. Since first I was given my own establishment when I was eighteen. I am thirty-five now and I assure you, my lord wizard, that no mage has been in here to make that first mark since they have been mine.”
“Knowing how you’ve kept yourself guarded, I’d say I believed you,” Antryg said, “except, of course, that one obviously was.”
“They were always about the Court, of course,” Pharos said. “My father...”
He hesitated.
“Exactly,” Antryg said quietly. “Your father. And Cerdic later. I know your father had a good deal to do with Salteris, as Head of the Council.” Listening, Joanna wondered if she detected the faintest of flaws in Antryg’s voice when he spoke the Archmage’s name. “Do you know who else?”
The little man shook his head. “I didn’t want to know. I considered it—” He licked his lips, shying again from the subject, and then simply concluded, “I didn’t want to know.”
Antryg was silent for a long time, his arms folded, his head down, and his strange, wide, light-gray eyes distant with thought. From somewhere, Joanna heard a clock speak eleven silvery chimes and felt all the deathly weariness of the day closing in on her—flight, fear, and sudden, starving hunger.
Then the wizard sighed and pushed up his spectacles to rub his eyes. “It’s very late now,” he said, “and Joanna and I both are very tired. At least I am and, if she isn’t, I suggest you hire her as your bodyguard. Unless you’re going to lock us away for good, Pharos, there are two things that I’d like to ask of you in the morning. Three things, actually, counting breakfast. Can your cook make muffins?”
It was the first time Joanna had seen Prince Pharos laugh, the pale, pretty face and sinful eyes screwing up in genuine amusement. “My dearest Antryg,” he said, laying what Joanna privately suspected of being an overly friendly hand on the Wizard’s arm, “if the muffins are not to your satisfaction, I give you full permission to flog the cook. He won’t quit, I assure you; he’d never relinquish his position as my cook. It’s far more than his reputation would be worth.”
“Excellent.” Antryg smiled and pushed his spectacles up on the bridge of his nose with one bony forefinger. “The second is that I’d like you to send for the contents of Nar-wahl Skipfrag’s laboratory, and the third... I’d like to look at your father’s rooms.”
“By the way,” said Joanna quietly, “I never had a chance to say thank you.”
Antryg, sitting in the dark window embrasure of the room the Prince had given him, up under the eaves of the Summer Palace’s mansard roof, looked around at her and smiled. A flicker of bluish light appeared in the air of the room between him and the door where she stood; it floated, like a negligent firefly, over to the exquisite ormolu table in the room’s center and came to rest on the wick of one of the unlit candles there. His voice was deep in the gloom. “I ought to say it was my pleasure, but diving under that portcullis—I can only think of two times I’ve been that frightened in my life. It is my pleasure,” he added, “that we’re both alive.”
“I wouldn’t say pleasure so much as stunned surprise.” She crossed the room to him, and he drew up his feet on the window seat to make room for her. Through the open casement, she could smell the smoke from the lamps and torches of the guards in the courtyard three storeys below and, when the wind shifted, the thick green smells of the palace park. “Decent of the Prince to send us up supper.”
“Considering what it took to get lobster patties at this hour,” Antryg agreed. “No matter what the muffins are like for breakfast, I shall have to lie and say I like them. Such a cook ought never to be flogged more often
than is necessary, as the Prince says, to keep him smart.”
Joanna chuckled. “Not to mention the clothes,” she added, touching the high, pleated collar of the pageboy’s shirt she wore. “He sent me up a gown for tomorrow. I’m wondering where the hell he got it.”
“Possibly one of his boyfriends...”
She poked him reprovingly in the knee with her foot and laughed. “Is one of the mages trying to kill him?”
“Oh, yes.”
“To put Cerdic on the throne?”
“If I were the sort of mage who routinely meddled in human affairs,” the wizard said gravely, “it’s what I’d do.”
She remembered Cerdic’s enthusiastic and unquestioning welcome of Antryg because he was a mage and the blind acceptance of the inherent lightness of wizards, started to speak, then was silent. For a moment, she contemplated that long, peculiar profile in the bluish glow of the witchlight, noticing how the reflections of the fires in the courtyard below touched hard little glimmers in the steel of his spectacle frames and the dreamy grayness of his eyes. He looked a little better than he had, less strained and gray, but the nervous energy that had gotten him through the last several hours was fading, even as it was for her. He looked tired and very vulnerable, sitting with his knees drawn up in the window seat, and she had to resist an overwhelming impulse to put out her hand and touch his arm.
Slowly, she said, “Are we dealing with several problems here or just one? The fading and the abominations—but you said you were coming to talk to some member of the Council? and there’s the Archmage.... And poor Caris—whatever’s happened to him?”
A smile tugged briefly at Antryg’s lips in the wan lucence of the witchlight. “I imagine poor Caris is still waiting for me outside a vacant building on the south side of the river. He’s very patient when he’s on a trail.”
“One of these days,” Joanna said severely, “Caris is going to murder you—and not because of his grandfather, either.”
The Silent Tower Page 28