The Silent Tower

by Barbara Hambly

  The Prince had gone, though his guards remained inevitably within call outside the door. A footman in the Prince’s ruby livery had brought them lunch, which lay in a picked-at ruin on the tray on the floor at Joanna’s side. Antryg had barely touched it or spoken.

  Twice while she was eating the honeyed ham and comfits, Joanna had been aware of him watching her, as he had watched her in the silvery moonlight of the Devil’s Road and again that morning in the Prince’s carriage. Evasive he had always been, but the closer they had come to Angelshand the closer they had drawn to the dark heart of the tangle of riddles surrounding them, the more pronounced that wariness, that fear, had become.

  Studying his preposterous profile against the flat brightness of the windows, she wondered for the thousandth time why.

  Was it because he knew her expertise lay in matters technological and he knew she would eventually scent through his lies and evasions to the mystery’s real heart? But though she had a sense of pattern, a feeling that events connected, she had no idea what the heart of it all was.

  The Prince’s upcoming marriage, the attempts on his life, and Cerdic’s stubborn attachment to the mages seemed to form one subset; the abominations, the original murder of the mage Thirle, and the fact that someone was going back and forth across the Void formed another. Her own kidnapping and that of the Archmage seemed linked in time, but not in any other way. The recurrent theme of madness—the prince’s, Antryg’s, the Emperor’s—seemed broken by a hiatus of over twenty years. Like Ariadne’s thread, the glittering trail of wizards’ marks ran through the dark labyrinth, but it seemed to lead nowhere. As a programmer, used to breaking all situations down into manageable subsets, she found that this computer-like logic failed her when it came to working in the other direction.

  Or was Antryg’s fear of her, she wondered, simply because he feared to trust? He had trusted, he said, once too readily and once too often. Did he fear to care for her, as she feared her caring for him, because of the power such caring gives?

  Maybe, she thought, if she were better with people than she was with programs and machines, she’d be able to tell whether he was lying or telling the truth. But in a sense, she felt that he had always done both.

  Still he did not answer her, and she said quietly, “It would help if you’d trust me.”

  She saw the quick shiver that went through him, succeeded immediately by the wry flicker of his grin. “Believe me, Joanna, it would help if I could trust anyone. But I’m like Pharos—afraid the person I hire to protect me is the one who’s been trying to kill me all along.”

  She frowned, hearing some note in his voice. “Is someone trying to kill you?”

  He regarded her with surprised gray eyes. “Of course, my dear. Caris, for one...”

  “He isn’t the one you’re thinking of, however,” she said. Though he did not reply, he seemed to withdraw a little into himself again, not willing to give anything away. “You said you wanted to find out from the Council of Wizards what happened twenty-five years ago. Was whatever it was connected with why the Prince went mad? It happened at the same time. But if it was hereditary, from his father...”

  He shook his head. “The Prince went mad because he could not accept the fact that two and two equal four,” he said gently. “Even as I did. As for his father...” He looked away from her, his eyes suddenly shadowed again with horror and grief. “That is another matter.”

  “But it connects somewhere, doesn’t it?” The pearl rosettes of her sleeve bows glimmered softly as she folded her arms. “And it connects with the fact that someone’s been moving back and forth across the Void to get something from my world, something that needs electricity to operate. They heard about Narwahl’s experiments with the teles...” She paused, frowning, and pushed at the corner of the tray at her feet with one slippered toe. “But why didn’t they steal the teles when they killed him?”

  “Obviously, because they had one of their own.” He unfolded his thin legs and hopped lightly to the floor, pacing with his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his trailing black coat. “More than one, since the power seems to be drawn from such an enormous area. Suraklin used to link them in series to increase their power, and presumably that’s what’s being done here. What runs on electricity in your world?”

  Joanna half-laughed, reminded absurdly of her mother’s request that she “explain this computer stuff to me.”

  “God—What doesn’t? Television...”

  “It needs a transmitter as well as a receiver,” the wizard objected. Joanna had explained to him some time ago the intricacies of television, though the ramifications of game shows and televised pro football had eluded him. “And no wizard with a good scrying-crystal would need one.”

  “Not unless he’d become secretly addicted to Gilligan’s Island reruns,” Joanna agreed. She started to lean back in the chair, then sat hastily up as the bodice boning poked her under the arm. “Same argument puts the kibosh on telephones. A factory, maybe? It would have a hell of an economic advantage over waterpower.”

  “With a supply of raw materials coming in, it would be a bit tricky to hide.” Antryg paused in his pacing, toying thoughtfully with his gimcrack necklaces.

  “Could they use magic to hide it?” Joanna suggested. “No,” she answered herself almost at once, “because such generation of the electricity kills magic, doesn’t it? Or could that be what they’re trying to do? Cripple everyone’s magic permanently? So whatever they’re doing, they won’t be found out?”

  “It’s a possibility.” Antryg frowned. “And very like him, now that I think of it.”

  “Like who?”

  He hesitated. “Whoever’s doing this—whoever it is. He—or she—is very clever...” His frown suddenly deepened, and Joanna would have given much to know whether what he next said was his true thought or something to turn her from the subject. “Cripple everyone’s power? Or drain it—and use it?”

  She was silent for a moment, struck by the monstrousness of the implication. “Could they?” She remembered suddenly Caris’ bitterness over losing his powers and Magister Magus’ fears. It crossed her mind to wonder where Caris was now and what he’d been doing since... was it really only the night before last?

  “I don’t know.” Antryg came over beside her and rested his long hands on the elaborate poppy-head finials of the tall chair back. “But power does move along the energy-lines. If it can be channeled into a central point...” Then he shook his head. “But I don’t see why electricity.”

  “No?” Joanna turned in the chair to look up at him, and the boning of her bodice stabbed her sharply again. “Ever since we talked at Devilsgate and you said spells were similar to programming, I’ve been wondering. Would it be possible to program a computer to do magic? A big one, like a Cray, that reproduces all the functions of the human brain?”

  “Reproduces the functions of the human brain,” the mage echoed softly. He was silent for a long time then, his gray eyes staring off into some inner distance. What he saw there Joanna could not guess, but his eyes slowly widened, as if they looked upon some unimaginable nightmare. So he had looked, she realized, that morning in the Prince’s coach, when he had learned or guessed what it was that had happened twenty-five years ago that had driven both himself and the Prince into the comforting refuge of madness. “Dear God...”

  “What is it?” She half rose; her hand on his velvet sleeve seemed to pull him from some private hell-vision of that final revelation. His eyes returned to hers, like the eyes of a man newly come from some other world to find all things in this one not as he had left them. “Tell me!”

  Their gazes locked; in his she saw the struggle of fear and trust, unwilling love, and the knowledge that he should not, must not, give to her more than he had. Then he looked away. “I—I don’t know,” he lied. “You’ve spoken of programs which can write, draw, and project events—which can lie, even, about their own existence!”

  “That’s not what I mea
nt!” When he tried to turn away, she caught a handful of frayed lapel, the velvet soft as moleskin in her fist. “You’ve known something all along, something you’ve been lying about...”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, his voice a little breathless. “It may not even be true—much of what I fear isn’t, or so they keep telling me. What functions of thought can a computer reproduce?”

  “Not a computer.” Joanna released her hold on him and rose from the chair herself, standing separated from him by the width of its thickly carved, black oak back. “A program. A series of subroutines, done infinitely fast. A computer can’t perceive patterns, but it can recognize them, if it breaks them down line by line. It’s why programmers think the way they do. You say magic is predicated on visualization and hope. With a computer, that’s graphics and statistical projection, since a computer doesn’t care what should or shouldn’t exist. But to write a series of programs that complex, you’d need a programmer who was also a wizard—or a programmer and a mage working together. Which you aren’t likely to find in either of our worlds.”

  She stopped. They stood for a moment, looking at one another. In a hard-hearted and detached corner of her mind, she suddenly knew how Antryg had felt when he had seen whatever hideous realization had been reflected in the Prince’s madness. Her own enlightenment beat upon her mind, as if she had walked from darkness into the agonizing glare of a magnesium flare.

  Looking up into his face, she saw that he knew she’d guessed.

  “You aren’t likely to find it in either of our worlds,” she repeated softly, “unless a mage came across the Void and kidnapped a programmer.”

  “Joanna...” There was neither surprise nor innocence in his face.

  “And got her to trust him,” she went on, and her voice suddenly shook. He had said, I will not take advantage of you.... She saw now that he had been like a cardsharp who passed the deal, using that, too, to gain her trust. Anger hit her—at him and at herself for falling for him, for caring. He had used her, played upon her sympathy for him and her dependence on him, as Gary had done years ago. He had seen her with Gary at the party. He must have known exactly what to do to gain first her trust and then her love. Her hand closed around the chair’s carved finial until the edges of the wooden leaves dug painfully into her fingers. Her voice in her own ears sounded cold and distant, like someone else’s.

  “Or was there some other reason you brought me here?”

  He said nothing, but there was despair in his eyes, the wreckage of all his hopes.

  She turned and left the attic, each step that carried her through the old door and past the guard in the corridor seeming like a separate action, unconnected with any before or after. He neither called nor tried to follow as she walked down the stuffy enclosure of the stair and away through the quiet vistas of the palace rooms, her mind blank of thought and bitter confusion in her heart.

  “Joanna!”

  In contrast to the strength of the butter-colored sunlight on the lawn, the shade of the grotto where Joanna sat was like dark indigo. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting—not long, she thought. The shadows of the marble statues lining the lawn—heroes in archaic armor overwritten, as Cerdic’s had been, with protective runes or the old, strange, animal-headed gods—hadn’t lengthened much. She looked around at the whisper; but in the shade of the artificial bower’s pink marble columns and twining roses, she saw nothing until Caris moved.

  “Caris!” She untucked her feet from beneath her petticoats and sprang up. The sasennan had gone back to the matte, dark, flowing coat and trousers of his vocation, his long sword held ready in its scabbard in his left hand. Confused and shaken by her realization of what Antryg wanted of her and by the violence of her own feelings, she found herself suddenly weak with relief at knowing she was not, after all, utterly without options.

  In the time she had been sitting here, it had dawned on her how absolutely in the wizard’s power she was. She had always known she depended on him, but now it had come to her that she could not leave him, even if she were willing to risk being stranded forever in a world that was at best miserably filthy and inconvenient and at worst perilous even to those who knew what they were doing in it. There was nowhere in this world for her to go and certainly nowhere that Antryg couldn’t talk the Prince into sending men to find her.

  She felt ridiculously like bursting into tears, but Caris, she knew, wasn’t the sort of young man who could cope with lachrymose females. Instead she took a deep breath and said, “You’re all right.”

  He nodded. The smoke-colored shadows didn’t hide the marks of strain and sleeplessness on his face. Some irreverent part of her came within an ace of asking him, How long did you wait outside that vacant building? but she pushed that thought away.

  “We’ve been seeking you in a scrying-crystal,” he said. “It wouldn’t work while you were with Antryg, but when you were at a distance from him...”

  “We?” she demanded. “The mages who escaped from St. Cyr...”

  “The rest of them were released this morning,” the sasennan said. “But I...”

  “That was Antryg’s doing,” she said and frowned, puzzled. “Though I don’t see why.”

  “He is closing in on his goal,” a quiet voice said from the rose-hung shadows of the pillars. “And perhaps he fears what some of them might say of him, should his name arise.”

  In the fawn-spotted, green gloom a shadow emerged from the deeper shadows, a slender old man of medium height, his tall forehead laddered with wrinkles and his long white hair hanging to square, narrow shoulders clothed in the black of a wizard’s robe. His eyes were the same dark coffee-brown as Caris’, with the same slight tilt to the corners. Joanna knew at once who he had to be.

  She stammered, “Your—I’m sorry, but I’m a stranger here, and this sounds really stupid, but I don’t know whether I’m supposed to genuflect or kiss your ring, and I’ve never figured out how to curtsy in these damn skirts.” She kicked aside the intrusive petticoats and stepped forward to take his strong, slender hand and to be greeted by the winter sunlight of his smile.

  “Then we’ll take your greeting as read,” he said. “Caris told me of you. I must say I am both astounded and relieved beyond expression to see you alive, free, and—in possession of your own mind.”

  She stared at the Archmage in shock. “What?”

  Dourly, Caris remarked, “I gather Antryg lost no time in getting on the good side of the Regent.”

  “The Regent needed his advice,” Joanna said. “He needed a wizard who couldn’t possibly have done magic in the last seven years.”

  “A convenient, if specious, argument,” Salteris said drily. “Antryg has been coming and going from the Silent Tower as he pleases for some months now.”

  “I—I wondered about that.” She stepped back and gestured the old man to the marble seat she had been occupying, a carved bench the size—and function, she suspected—of a love seat, embellished at both ends with cupids and wreaths of carved roses the size of cabbages. Neither it, nor the marble statues in the gardens, she had noticed, bore the usual festoons of bird droppings; the Prince’s predilection for flogging his servants evidently had certain valuable side effects beyond his ability to get lobster patties for his guests in the middle of the night. “That is—Antryg always seems to know more than he should and he can’t be that good a guesser.”

  “No.” The old man gently shook off Caris’ efforts to help him down and seated himself at Joanna’s side. “He is in precisely the position of a doctor who doses a man’s coffee with poison and then claims a miracle cure for producing the antidote—a favorite dog wizard trick. And Pharos, I fear, has placed his trust in him, to the exclusion of every mage who has been abroad in the world. In many ways, Pharos is as credulous as his cousin, though far more dangerous. I am only pleased, my child, to see you safe.”

  “Believe me, the feeling’s more than mutual.” She glanced up at Caris, who stood quietly at his
grandfather’s back. “I’m glad he found you safe.”

  “I did not find him,” the sasennan corrected her. “He found me. No one finds the Archmage unless he wills it.”

  “But where were you?” She looked back at the old man. “Did...” But she found herself almost unable to speak Antryg’s name.

  He must have sensed it, for the dark, severe eyes softened with pity and understanding. “Lost,” he said. “I don’t know—the spell was one of confusion. I wandered for days, it felt like, but I had no way of telling how many, for there was neither day nor night where I was. Only darkness...” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I escaped, but it has left me exhausted.”

  Quietly, Caris asked, “Could he have pushed you into the Void itself? To wander between worlds?”

  Salteris passed a hand over his brow and shook his head. “I don’t know. Suraklin had a black crystal with a labyrinth inside. He could trap a soul within it, to wander forever in the lattices of a gem small enough to pick up in his hand.”

  “And Antryg was Suraklin’s student,” Joanna murmured, remembering the teles, the elementals that had slain Narwahl Skipfrag, and me abominations....

  The Archmage’s dark eyes rested on her for a moment. Then he sighed. “No,” he said softly. “No—it is worse than that. Antryg...” He hesitated, folding his hands with his forefingers extended against his lips, his deep-set eyes gazing out into the sunlit vistas of the garden beyond the shadows. “My child, I fear that Antryg Windrose has not existed for a long time.”

  She didn’t know why her eyes burned or her throat seemed to constrict with grief; it was grief, she understood, for someone she had never known. In the silence, she could hear the twitter of sparrows marking out their territories among the trees and the far-off clatter of carts beyond the walls of the palace parkland in Angelshand, a quarter-mile away. Words drifted through her mind:

  He could break anyone’s mind to his bidding...

  ...He wanted to live forever...

  ...Where’s he been, if he hasn’t?