“Plastic, mostly.” She shoved her hands into her jeans pockets and looked around her at the house, realizing at last what it was that had chiefly bothered her about Gary. “It’s cheap, and it’ll do.”
“But it isn’t—it isn’t right,” the sasennan insisted.
Salteris, who had been standing by the patio doors, gazing thoughtfully out at the smog, let fall the drapes and turned back. “I doubt one person in ten notices, anymore,” he remarked, almost casually. “People get used to things. In time, they cease to remember and don’t miss what they’ve forgotten they had.” He came back to where Joanna stood, once again in the well-worn comfort of jeans and t-shirt, and said, “The mark is upstairs, isn’t it?”
The mark was at Salteris’ own eye level. He brushed his hand along the wood, as Antryg had done on the white, curlicued paneling of the Emperor’s suite. Like a glowing pixel, the scribble of light seemed to float up out of the depths of the grain. The wizard stood for a long time gazing at it; even when it faded again, as it did almost at once, he did not move, but remained, as if he could read it still.
“Was that the mark,” he asked her at last, “that you saw in San Serano? In the great computer room there?”
“I think so,” she said hesitantly. She pushed back her unruly blond hair from her face, trying to remember something beyond the terror, the queer, smoky smell of the robes, and the scorch of a man’s breath on her temple.
“His influence can be incredibly strong upon the minds of those who know him,” the old man murmured. Sharply through the curtains, a scissor edge of late sunlight rimmed his angular profile, so like Caris’, and haloed the free-floating strands of his silver hair. “And even those who do not know him yet—the mark influences their minds, as if he spoke to them when their thoughts were elsewhere. The mark prepares the way. I see his influence in your eyes still.”
She looked away, feeling her face go blotchy red with shame that he should guess.
“You do not want to believe entirely ill of him,” Salteris continued gently. “You search for the reasons he did what he did, motives to make his use of you other than what it was. It says better of you than it does of him.”
Her throat tight and aching as if she had screamed her heart out, she stood staring at the silent red eyes of the IBM in its bank of 20-megabyte disk drives.
“I know, Joanna.” The slender, powerful hands rested on her shoulders. “Even now, even knowing what I know through the memory of the grip of his mind upon mine, even knowing I must meet him again, it is my instinct to trust him. That is the terror—and the strength—of his spell.”
Caris turned sharply from examining the neat shelves of additional ROM and backup floppies, the sunlight slicing through the single chink of curtain bursting against the brass of dagger hilt and buckle. “Must you meet him?”
“He has not yet been here.” The old man folded his hands in the sleeves of his robe. “He will come to this, his mark.”
“Why?”
The dark gaze rested gently on her for a moment before the Archmage replied.
“Perhaps there is something here he wants,” he said. “Perhaps—for very little, if any, magic operates here, and it is hard to say—perhaps because he will sense you near it. But he will come—he must. And I must meet him.”
Caris asked softly, “Alone?” In the inflection of his voice, Joanna could hear that he already knew his grandfather’s reply.
Salteris sighed and folded his hands before him, forefingers pressed to his lips. At length he said, “Caris, I am sure of myself. To introduce a second factor, even one that I trust implicitly, as I trust you, would be to increase the danger.”
“But your magic doesn’t operate here,” Caris began protestingly.
“Neither does his.”
“But he is twenty years younger than you and half a foot taller! He can...”
“My son,” the old man said, with a smile, “do you think me that defenseless?”
Caris said nothing.
“And then, someone must stay with Joanna.” The dark gaze moved thoughtfully to her in the close, hot gloom of the computer room. “I do not think he will pass me unseen, but he might. If he does, he must not be allowed to speak to her.”
Neither Caris nor Joanna spoke; but judging by the sasennan’s face, he wasn’t any more thrilled with the idea than she was.
More gently, Salteris went on, “You stand in grave danger still, Joanna. Even knowing what you know, you want to trust.”
She looked away again. Hating herself, she nodded. Dark and compelling, the old man’s glance went to his grandson. “If you cannot prevent him from speaking to her in any other way, kill him.” He turned and walked to the window, flinging back the curtain to admit a drench of harsh and smog-stained afternoon light. Beyond the window, the hills that hid San Serano bulked in the haze, and between them, like a gun sight, stood the dusty little shed in which they had stepped from the dark of the Void.
“I will wait for him there,” he said. “He is sly....” He lifted his thin, white fingers at the intake of Caris’ protesting breath. “He will not speak with me, if you are near. He has reason to fear you, my son. Trust me.” He looked back at them, the hot sunlight outlining the worn contours of his face, suddenly very fragile-looking in his faded black robe. “I know what it is that I do.”
The light had shifted again to the sharp-edged champagne brilliance of the long Southern California afternoon when Antryg came walking over the hills.
Caris and Joanna were in the computer room, where they had been since Salteris left them, alternately speaking of what had passed since they’d parted at Magister Magus’ and watching for movement in the parched ochre vastness of grass and dust.
Caris had turned from the window to regard Gary’s monstrous new IBM among its red-eyed banks of monitors and surge suppressors, as he had done at intervals, all afternoon. After some moments, he said, “This is the thing that is your life and the life of all your world? The machine that thinks like a man?”
“Not like a man.” Joanna folded up her legs to sit cross-legged on the corner of the computer table, the weary portion of her mind that was not trying desperately to avoid thinking of Antryg taking considerable comfort in the freedom of jeans. He is walking into a trap, part of her said, and she pushed the treacherous impulse to care aside. “Computers can arrive at the same conclusions a person can, with the same kind of logic people are capable of, when they aren’t hoping that two and two won’t equal four....” She paused, then went on. “But not like a man.” She reached for the switch on the main terminal. “Would you care to try?”
He stepped back hastily and shook his head. Then, seeing her startled expression, he flushed a little and explained, “It is not the Way of the Sasennan. We are trained to be what we are, and to do what we do. All this—” He gestured around him at the high tech fixtures of the house, the soft hum of the air conditioner, and the alien richness of the world, “It is not supposed to matter to the sasennan. We are weapons, honed to a single end. That is all.”
She remembered Kanner—remembered, also, Caris’ uneasiness at operating without a master, or with only the dottily masterful Antryg to give him orders. In his own way, she realized, Caris was as bad with people as she.
Curious, she said, “But you were mageborn. You were going to be a wizard. Isn’t that just the opposite?”
He hesitated, as if it were something he had never quite articulated to himself, let alone anyone else. As he always did when he was trying to say what he really meant, he spoke slowly. “It is, and it isn’t. As a mage, one can’t give oneself to any of it, either. They say neither the mage nor the sasennan drinks the world’s wine, as street-warriors and dog wizards do. So it isn’t—” He shook his head. “It isn’t safe to sniff at the fumes. At least,” he added more hesitantly, “it isn’t safe for me. To be what we are, and only what we are, to put everything into that, is what hones us to a killing edge. Anything else is a softeni
ng.”
“The more you do, the more you do.” Joanna sighed. He had a point. It was a definite changing of mental gears to go from dealing with computers to dealing with people, particularly after she’d been programming for hours or days at a time. And indeed, most of the time she did feel more at ease dealing with her IBM than she did dealing with Gary or with any other human being... at least, until recently.
Antryg...
Not Antryg, she told herself wretchedly. Suraklin. Suraklin.
Caris turned suddenly. Though he did not speak, Joanna was on her feet and at his side, looking out toward the tiny, ragged outline of the shed.
In the fulvous sunlight, Salteris stood in front of the shed, unmoving save for the wind stirring his black robes and silky hair. After what seemed like a long moment, Antryg came into view above the tawny crest of the hill.
He had changed back into the jeans and scruffy t-shirt in which she had first seen him, here in this house. The slanted afternoon light caught the silver-foil HAVOC across his chest; though she knew it was only the name of a rock group, the word had a grim significance to her, knowing what she now knew. His cracked spectacles glinted as he held out his hand to the unmoving Archmage and took a step closer to him. Joanna thought he spoke; but at this distance, it was impossible to tell.
She could not see whether the old man replied. In her heart she knew her fears should be for Salteris’ safety rather than Antryg’s.
After a moment, the younger wizard stepped forward and bending his tall form, embraced the old man. After brief hesitation, Salteris’ arms came up to return the embrace. Antryg led him gently into the shed.
Beside her, Joanna heard Caris whisper, “No...”
She caught him by the arm as he turned away. “He said he had to meet him alone.” She was aware her hand shook.
“He also said that the one thing he feared was Antryg’s charm.” He stepped back from Joanna, the first true kinship she had ever seen for her in his face. “I know. I—when I first met him, I trusted him. And I’ve had to fight all this time to keep from trusting him again. I know.” He nodded toward the silent shed in the puma-gold emptiness of the hills. “Are you coming?”
The air in the patio was hot, in spite of the cooling proximity of the pool. From the iron gate that looked out into the hills, they saw Antryg emerge from the shed and stand for a time, his back leaned against the splintery wood, his head bowed in exhaustion. Caris glanced quickly at Joanna, fear in his eyes; when they looked again, the mad wizard was gone.
Caris, at a dead run, reached the hill long before Joanna did.
Parching and oppressive, the heat of the afternoon seemed to have imbued itself into the coarse wood of the shed, along with the stinks of dirt and old oil slowly baking in the summer silence. Pierced by splinters of blinding light from the chinks in the walls, the shed’s darkness defeated Joanna’s eyes as she stepped through the open door, but it seemed to her that she already knew what she would find inside.
The Archmage Salteris lay in a corner, behind a crazy pile of splintered plywood and the dismembered parts of a car. He had been laid out carefully, a small, frail form under his black robes. There was dust in his white hair. His eyes had been closed, and his mouth, also, though his face was still a hideous mottled gray-blue with strangulation. Even with the merciful masking of the shadows, Joanna could not deceive herself that he might be somehow revived. She had killed two men. She knew what death looked like now.
The unbearable brilliance of a crack of sunlight outlined Caris’ face in gold as he knelt beside the corpse. He stared out straight ahead of him, his face blank with a kind of shock. He had relied on the old man, Joanna realized, as much as he had loved him. His rage at Antryg had come as much from fear of losing Salteris’ support as it had been from his fanatical loyalty. He had been able to believe in his grandfather’s disappearance, she remembered, but not in his death. He had made himself a weapon for those slender, blue-veined hands. It had always been inconceivable to him that they would one day fall slack.
His face inhumanly calm and still, Caris lifted one of those hands, limp now as a bundle of jointed sticks. He turned it over to look at the white fingers and palms, then laid it as it had been, back upon the breast. Tenderly, still with that odd, almost wondering numbness, he brushed aside the white silk of the hair and looked for a time at the bruises on the colorless, crepey flesh of the throat.
Joanna thought it was only some final seeking for contact with the old man he had loved, until she heard him whisper, “Why? Was your trust in him so great that you didn’t even struggle when you felt his hands around your throat? Could he do even that to you?”
Then suddenly he doubled over, as if some poison, drunk unnoticed, had finally taken grip. The big, well-shaped hands pressed his face, and shudder after silent shudder of grief racked through his body. He twisted aside from the hand Joanna tried to lay on his back and knelt in the stifling dust, hands pressed to his face as if he could squeeze all tears, all sound, all feeling back inside of him, as it was the Way of the Sasennan to do. Barred with sunlight, Salteris’ distorted face seemed strangely calm, as if he knew that none of this, nor any further machinations of the Dark Mage, concerned him any longer.
After a long time, Joanna asked, “What can we do?”
Joanna heard Antryg’s light footfall in the party room an hour and a half later. Outside the kitchen windows, the afternoon light had slanted further, then taken on the curious crystal quality of evening, as the wind moved the smog further east. She had been sitting and staring out at the changes of the light since returning to the house. She felt empty and cold inside, as if some final illusion had collapsed; her thoughts seemed to have slipped into read-only mode, going round and round until they were exhausted, without producing anything except that, like Caris, she must do what she must do.
But when she heard the footfalls that she knew for Antryg’s, it felt as if everything within her were passed suddenly through a wringer.
She heard him pause in the party room. Forcing a calm upon herself she had never known she possessed, she got to her feet, walked to the stove, and poured the water she had heated in the teakettle over the combination of instant coffee and crushed sleeping pills in the cup on the counter. She took a deep breath and conjured again for herself the vision of Salteris’ dead, swollen face in the brown gloom of die shed. Then she picked up the cup and went into the party room.
He was standing near the curtained glass of the doors, looking sick unto death.
The naturalness of her own voice astounded her. “Did Salteris find you?”
He looked up at the sound of her voice, and some expression—shock, dismay, despair of a situation that was hopeless—superseded the misery and exhaustion on his face. He shut his eyes for a moment, fighting some terrible inner weight that seemed to have descended on his wide, bony shoulders, and whispered hopelessly, “You came with him?” Then, realizing that he should not even know of Salteris’ presence in this world, he looked at her again and added, “Salteris?”
“He brought me back here,” Joanna said. “He came to me in the garden—he said he had to speak to you. He didn’t say why. We went up the attic but you had gone. So I asked him to bring me back, and he did.”
He closed his eyes momentarily. The lines around them looked as if they’d been put in with a chisel in the discolored flesh. He said, “I wouldn’t have left you.”
“I didn’t know that.”
He looked so shaken, so drained of all his usual ebullience, that it was absolutely natural that she should hand him the coffee. She had to force her hand to it, force herself to look into his face as she did it, telling herself he was Suraklin. Suraklin! He drank it without a word, grateful for the warmth of it. After a moment he said, “Thank you.” Going to the couch, he sat down as if he had only just recalled that it was possible to do so.
He ran his fingers through his graying hair and seemed to pull himself together. “I’m sorry,”
he said. “I didn’t mean to leave you long—not even this long. I should have returned earlier than this.” He swallowed, and she saw the muscles of his jaw harden for a moment. “And Pharos would have looked after you, kept you safe. But there was something here I had to find.”
She remained standing in front of him, her arms folded and her heart hammering, but her whole body feeling strangely numb. “And did you?”
He shook his head, a small gesture, defeated. “No.” He looked down, turning the remains of the drugged coffee in his big hands, staring down into the dregs as he had once studied tea-leaves in the posthouses to buy them supper. He asked carefully, “Did Salteris say where he had been?”
“No,” Joanna said. “And frankly, I didn’t care.”
He looked up at her quickly, that look she had seen before, with the ruin of all that he had ever sought or hoped in his eyes.
“I don’t want anything further to do with this,” she said, fighting to keep the tremor out of her voice. “I only wanted to come home, to get out of whatever is going on. You said once...” Her voice faltered. “You said once you’d see I came to no harm. If you meant that, just leave me alone. All right?”
He said nothing for a time, but their eyes held, and for a long moment she had the impression that he wavered on the brink of telling her the truth, of stepping beyond that self-imposed wall and trusting her, as it was still her instinct, fight it though she might, to trust him. Then he sighed, and in an almost soundless voice, agreed. “All right.”
She couldn’t help herself. “Will you be all right?” What a stupid question, she told herself an instant later.
He managed the ghost of his old warm, half-demented smile. “Oh, yes.” He set the cup down at his side. “As long as I stay a step ahead of the Council. As long as I can...” He paused and shook his head, as if trying to clear it. “I’m sorry, Joanna. But the mark on the wall... the mark on the wall...”
The Silent Tower Page 33