Barbara Hambly - Windrose 2 - The Silicon Mage

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THE SILICON MAGE
Barbara Hambly
[22 oct 2001 – scanned for #bookz, proofread and released – v1]
CHAPTER I
The worst thing about knowing that Gary Fairchild had been dead for a month was seeing him
every day at work.
"So whatcha doing after we get outta here tonight, babe?"
Joanna Sheraton tried not to stiffen, tried to recapture the half tolerant, half evasive tone
characteristic of her conversations with him before... before. "I don't know, Gary. Ruth and I had
talked about going to the movies." It sounded tinnily unconvincing even to her own ears.
Gary's face, as he leaned around the avocado burlap padded partition into her cluttered
programming cubicle, fell into its familiar pout. But there was a rehearsed quality to it, as
there was to the slouching stance of that compactly muscled body in its assortment of Sears' best
polyesters. It was something he knew Gary used to do, but now and then he forgot and stood
straight and poised. There was an amber glint far back in the brown eyes, worlds distant from
Gary's doglike eagerness.
Joanna felt her heart pounding fast and turned back to comparing the green lines of
information on her terminal with the bug riddled runout of the Tiger missile test analysis
program, so he wouldn't see the nervous tremor of her mouth.
"Babe, what's the matter? You mad at me?" He had the whine down perfect that time.
She swung around a tad too quickly. "No. That is..." It was astonishingly difficult to
remember patterns of voice and behavior several months old, particularly when she thought about
them consciously, particularly with those brown eyes, watchful now, studying her face. She
swallowed hard and pushed back the feathery tangle of untidy blond curls from her face.
"Babe, listen." He came around the partition, removed a stack of printouts from the cubicle's
other chair, and sat down with that new, lithe grace, reaching out to take her hands. The nails
were growing back—Gary had habitually bitten them to the quick. It was the closest that she'd let
him get to her since she'd guessed what had happened to Gary—to the real Gary.
She made herself calm, made her eyes meet his.
He went on, "I don't know where you went when you disappeared at the end of August, or what
happened to you..." That was a lie. He knew, all right; the only thing he didn't know was how much
she had realized on the night of her return. "But I know something's been bothering you ever since
you came back. You've been avoiding me."
"No!" Again it was too quick. The management of San Serano habitually turned off the air
conditioning in Building Six around three in the afternoon; the close swelter of the October heat
was, she hoped, enough to account for the crawl of sweat down her face and neck. Stammering, she
tried to recoup. "I've been sort of avoiding everybody, Gary. Really, I just I just don't want to
see anyone now."
He smiled a little. "That's why you're going to the movies with Ruth?" His fingers tightened
over hers. She hoped to hell they didn't feel as cold to him as they did to her. His eyes warmed
with all Gary's old shallow charm. "You've got to deal with it sometime, babe. Get it out in the
open." Past the cubicle door, voices sounded, and the scuff of feet echoed oddly in the high
ceilings of the plant's testing bays just beyond the computer section where they sat. It was five
o'clock. People were going home.
Hastily she pulled her hands away from him. Over her shoulder, as she began to stumble through
backup procedures, he went on. "Why don't you come out to dinner with me, we go back to my place,
and we talk. Okay?"
Two and a half months ago the invitation would have meant merely that he was going to try and
talk her into bed with him. Now she knew, with a cold that seemed to spread from her hands and
feet to the very pit of her stomach, that what he wanted was to get her alone.
"Another time, Gary." Her hands fumbled the typed commands; she hit the ESCAPE button and
tried again, hoping he wouldn't read her fear and begin to ask himself why.
"Babe..." He came around behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, bare in the sleeveless
top that was the only answer to the heat of an unspeakable California autumn. She had to clench
her teeth and fight not to strike his hands away with loathing and terror. "Next week?"
"Maybe..." For a horrifying instant she blocked on the proper command to get out of the
mainframe, her distracted mind praying he wouldn't notice.
"Tuesday?"
She was about to say "Maybe" again, then realized that every moment the discussion lasted,
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people were leaving the plant. In a very few minutes Building Six would be virtually empty, and he
wouldn't have to maneuver to get her alone...
She turned in her swivel chair, looked up into his eyes, and conjured up a sigh. "All right."
He smiled, but there was a gleam of a different triumph in his eyes.
She was shaking all over as she walked out to the parking lot.
He had been trying for weeks to get her alone, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly; like
her, he was working delicately around things that he wasn't supposed to know, pretending he didn't
know exactly what had happened to her in those weeks at the end of summer when she'd been gone,
pretending he hadn't met her on the other side of the dark Void that separated universe from
universe.
He hadn't been Gary then, of course.
Joanna shivered as she started up the car, a decrepit blue bomber of a '75 Mustang,
remembering the frail, delicate old Archmage, the head of the Council of Wizards, Salteris
Solaris. He'd fooled them all: his grandson the young warrior Stonne Caris; Gary—the real Gary, in
those days whom he'd duped into acting for him on this side of the Void; and all the Wizards of
the Council... herself... He'd fooled them, and had left poor Salteris' stripped out husk of body
and mind to migrate on and devour Gary's self in his turn, as he'd left others.
He was Suraklin the Dark Mage, now after her.
The damnable thing was that there was no proof.
It was no wonder, she thought, that Antryg Windrose went insane.
She guided the car down the long stretch of Lost Canyon Road to where the Ventura Freeway lay,
a glittering snake of constipated steel wavering with heat dance, and wondered bleakly if Antryg
were still alive.
He has to be, she thought, a threadbare litany with which she had tried to sustain herself for
the last four weeks. Please, God, don't let him be dead.
She had no proof of that, either.
Tears of remorse, anger, and shame burned her eyes.
Likewise, she had no proof that those blank periods of gray and causeless depression that had
more and more often troubled her and everyone she knew were anything other than her own unsettled
mind. Yes, at such times no one at San Serano seemed to be able to do any work or to perform such
tasks as they attempted correctly; yes, such spells coincided with an increase in newspaper
accounts of both suicides and senseless gang violence, not only in Los Angeles, but in San
Francisco, New York, Tokyo, London, or anywhere else she could read about. One or two newspapers
had come up with facile sociological theories about economic anxiety and shifts in demographics.
They might even have been right. But going downstairs to visit her friend Ruth after one such
spell, Joanna had seen the painting on which Ruth had spent weeks, gessoed over with great,
impatient smears of hardening white.
That was still not proof that the life energy of the world was being intermittently drained
and bled—not fatally, or at least not intrinsically fatally—across the Void, to create electricity
to power a computer in a world which had neither.
In the last four weeks, Joanna had read a great deal about that computer in Suraklin's files.
She nosed the Mustang up the freeway on ramp, one tedious car length at a time, and into the
sluggish flow of traffic. Whatever air conditioning system the car had once possessed had bitten
the big one years ago; she relied on what Ruth called four eighty air conditioning; one opened all
four windows and drove at eighty. It worked when one wasn't trying to get down the 101 at five
fifteen on a Friday afternoon with everybody else in the southern half of the state of California.
At least she was inbound, toward L.A. instead of away from it; the traffic was moving at about two
yards per hour, but moving. The outbound lanes were stopped in both directions as far as the eye
could see.
The slowness gave her time to think about tonight, and with thought came fear.
She'd been living with fear for over a month now and she hadn't gotten used to it yet. The
abnormally heavy traffic reminded her again that it was Friday, making her heart triphammer with
dread. There was a good chance that it would be tonight...
She and Antryg Windrose had guessed that Suraklin had a computer whose electrical/magical
power relays fed on life, hidden in some fortress, some cavern, or some other hideaway in the
Empire of Ferryth, the world on the other side of the Void, before she'd ever tapped into
Suraklin's files. For months Gary had been programming them into the big Cray mainframe at San
Serano, while he'd worked at stealing by modem powered computer scam an experimental mainframe of
artificial intelligence proportions to set up on the other side of the Void. It was ultimately
ironic, she thought wryly, that, having stolen via computer, Gary's personality, his self, should
now be nothing more than a series of programs logged in a computer's electronic guts.
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She'd seen that program. Everything about Gary—his likes and dislikes, his intricate network
of computer tapped bank accounts, the affairs he'd carried on with other women while he'd sworn
his undying love to her, and the details of the particularly nasty variety of pornography he'd
favored—had all been neatly digitalized. In other files, she'd found the details of the old
Archmage Salteris' personality and what had been that of the poor imbecilic Emperor of Ferryth,
whose shell still stumbled drooling through the palace at Angelshand while his mad son ruled the
Empire.
And with them was the personality, the memories, and the knowledge of the man who had stolen
and inhabited the bodies and minds of the Emperor, of Salteris, and of Gary in turn—the evil old
man whose speech patterns and gestures Gary occasionally used and whose amber cat glint eyes had
watched her so intently today, the wizard Suraklin, whom all had once called the Dark Mage.
The computer was his ticket to eternity. Joanna knew it existed and knew he was programming
his personality, petrifying it in everlasting silicon, so that he would at last live forever. The
drain on the life energies of her own world and of the world in which the computer itself was
situated—the world across the Void—wasn't strong enough to kill. It would only maim, in a way for
which there was no word, forever.
She knew it existed, but she had no proof.
She was fighting him absolutely alone.
She edged the car out of traffic, off the freeway and into a supermarket parking lot in
Encino, still halfway across the San Fernando Valley from her home. From the front seat, she
fished her purse, a monstrous affair of macrame and bunny skins the size and weight of a dead
Labrador dog; from the trash pit of the trunk she dug a blue nylon backpack of the kind schoolkids
carry books in, crammed to bursting and heavy as if it contained lead. Slinging these over her
shoulder, she locked up the car and crossed the parking lot on foot, a small, sturdy girl, her
untidy blond curls now damp and matted with sweat, like a schoolkid herself in her worn blue jeans
and sleeveless top. Within fifteen minutes she was on a bus headed back toward San Serano.
Definitely, she thought, a candidate for the Academy for the Bewildered. Her behavior in the
last month—breaking into computer files, hiding her car and sneaking back to the darkened plant
after everyone was gone, avoiding the man she'd been sleeping with for the last two years—was
bizarre enough to qualify her as a paranoid in anybody's book. Her dreams were something she
wouldn't wish on her worst enemy.
"I've spent most of my life terrified of a man who's been dead for years," Antryg Windrose had
told her once. And she understood now how the Prince Regent had become a hopeless paranoid at the
age of ten, positive that his father the Emperor had ceased to be his father and unable to prove
it to a soul.
She leaned her head against the vibrating metal of the window frame of the bus, closed her
eyes, and tried not to smell the fattish man in a brown leisure suit who'd come to sit next to her
on the crowded conveyance.
The whole situation—the events of her disappearance, the terrible thing she had learned, the
tall, gentle madman who had kept her safe both from the Inquisition and from the random
abominations traveling now through the Void between universes—had the aspect of some hideous
quadratic equation, with two solutions and no means of determining which was correct.
The daylight side of the equation was simply that she had been temporarily insane. That was
easy. At Gary's house party last August, she'd imbibed some chemically enhanced punch, of which
there'd been a fair amount, and had undergone a long period of illness and violent hallucinations,
peopled by wizards, warriors, evil princes, and the kind of man whose love she had always craved.
And, like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, she had waked again to a black and white world of
people she had known all her life saying soothingly to her, "It was only a dream, dear; only a
dream."
The night side of the equation was also a dream.
That dream had come to her a few nights after her return to this world from wherever she had
been. It had recurred—cloudy, haunting, terrible five or six times since.
In the dream she was in a stone walled room, like the dungeon of the Inquisition from which
Antryg had rescued her; by its heavy proportions, it was somewhere underground. Clammy cold
radiated from the damp wall behind her, but she was sweating from the heat that blazed from the
condensed cherry flames on the room's small hearth. A man was working at the fire, bent over it
with his troll shadow flung vast and fidgeting on the curved stone of wall and roof groin,
stripped to loincloth and shoes in the heat, with his skull shaved bald. In the corner where she
stood, Joanna could smell the acrid reek of his sweat. The faint, brisk tapping of his little
hammer on iron sounded loud in the silence, punctuating the crackle of the coals and the asthmatic
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hiss of the bellows being worked for him by a girl apprentice whose sleeveless shift showed biceps
like a man's. She, too, was shaved bald, as was the big, clumsy looking woman in gray velvet robes
who stood before the hearth, perspiration trickling down the fatty rolls of her neck. The smell of
unwashed wool, wet earth, and smoke lay heavy on the air.
That fat woman was looking, not at what the smith was doing by the fire, but at the doorway
opposite, a low black arch of shadows, sinister as the maw of some Boschian beast.
In time, there was movement in that dark, and the fat woman in gray folded her hands over her
stomach and smiled.
The man they brought in was taller than all but two of the guards who held him. When Joanna
had stood in the circle of his arms, her head had not come as high as those broad, bony shoulders.
Framed in a tangled explosion of graying brown hair, his face was chalky with exhaustion, the wide
gray eyes in their bistered hollows dilated with drugs.
The big woman stepped forward, her eyes like pieces of chipped blue glass in the pouchy flesh.
"Antryg Windrow," she said, and the prisoner raised his head.
Without his spectacles, Joanna knew he was half blind. She saw the swooping network of lines
raying back from eyelids to temples and down over his cheeks tighten as he tried to get her into
focus.
"Antryg Windrow, do you confess to the crimes of which you have been accused?"
He drew in breath to speak, then paused. Sweat shone in the torchlight on his upper lip, the
preposterous arch of his nose, and the pit of his throat, visible through the tattered collar of
the coarse robe he wore. Asleep, dead fifty years from now, Joanna knew she would recognize his
voice in her dreams.
"Herthe, I don't care what you do to me, but please believe that killing me will not remove
the danger you're all in. Suraklin..."
A guard behind him did something to one of his pinioned arms; he cried out and the other guard
caught him as his knees buckled. In the crazily leaping shadows, Joanna could see that the first
guard was Stonne Caris, the Archmage's grandson.
The woman Herthe stepped forward as the guards dragged Antryg upright again. "Do not name your
master to us," she said softly. "And do not think to frighten us into letting you live. You have
already signed the confession of your crimes." Her voice sank lower, cold as poisoned ice. "Is it
necessary that, as Bishop in charge of this Inquisition, I require you to do so again?"
He looked away from that flat stare, and a shudder went through his body. His voice was almost
inaudible. "No."
"Do you confess to violating the first law of the Council of Wizards, to breaking your vows to
the Council never to use your powers, either for ill or for what seems good, in the affairs of
humankind?"
He nodded, still not meeting her eyes. "Yes."
"Do you confess to attempting to murder the Prince Regent Pharos by means of magic?"
"Yes."
"Do you confess to the murder of Salteris Solaris, Archmage of the Council?"
He closed his eyes, fighting within himself against grief, guilt, and despair. It was a long
time before he could speak; and then, it was only the soundless movement of his lips. "Yes."
The Bishop signed to the blacksmith beside the hearth. He straightened up, holding in his
hands the thing he had been forging. Those of Antryg's guards whom Joanna recognized by their
black robes as wizards fell hastily back. Caris, too, a wizard born, flinched and averted his face
from it, though he did not release his grip on Antryg's arm.
Panic and despair flooded the mad wizard's gray eyes. "No," he whispered desperately, and
tried to back away; Caris twisted his arm again, brutally forcing him forward. "Herthe, that isn't
necessary. The Sigil of Darkness is on the Tower door; that is enough. I can't touch it, can't
pass it, no wizard can..."
"Yet you escaped from this Silent Tower before," the Bishop said impassively. A spurt of
yellow firelight winked balefully on the iron collar in the smith's hands, flaring across the
crooked symbol of lead and jewels worked into its center. "The Sigil of Darkness is the Seal of
the Dead God, the death of power. It should keep you from escaping again until the time of your
execution."
"I won't," Antryg said, his voice low and desperate, staring at the thing in the smith's hands
as if hypnotized. "I swear to you I won't try to escape, only don't... You don't understand,
you're not a wizard, please..."
The smith stepped forward, the iron collar in his hands. It took four guards to force Antryg
to his knees, to strip back his faded robes, and to hold him immobile by the hair, the arms, the
shoulders, while the smith fixed the collar around his neck and soldered shut it lock. Caris was
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one of them; but, mageborn as he was, even the proximity of the Sigil left him sweating and gray
lipped. Though his grip never slacked, not once throughout did he look at the thing they were
fastening against Antryg's flesh. Only when they were done and the other guards released him did
Caris thrust the renegade wizard from him, sending him sprawling to the filth of the stone floor.
Every time she had dreamed this, Joanna fought to leave the shadowy corner where she stood to
go to his side. It was like trying to move, not under water, but smothered like a fly in the
treacly amber of the firelight. Even her cries were stillborn in her aching throat. For a long
minute, there was no sound in that dreadful room, save the cracking of the fire, and Antryg's
hoarse, sobbing breath.
Then Caris asked quietly, "Why this?"
The Bishop fixed upon him her clammy blue gaze.
In a face still white from the mere closeness to the Sigil of Darkness, the young man's brown
eyes smoldered with hate. "He has confessed and been condemned by the Emperor, by the
Witchfinders, and by the Council of Wizards. Why take the trouble of binding his powers, instead
of killing him now? Has someone on the Council gotten jealous of the Council's rights to judge its
own?"
"You are a sasennan of the Council, Caris, their living weapon." The words came out as flat
and cold as her fishbelly eyes. "It is not for the sword to question the hand that wields it."
Passion shook his low voice. "Salteris was my grandfather, damn you!"
"Caris." Ghostlike, the form of the wizard Lady Rosamund materialized in the darkness of the
low doorway, the mage who had led in Antryg's arrest. Behind the glitter of her bullion stitched
stole of office, she seemed little more than shadow within shadow, and those gathered behind her
even less than that. "You put that away," she reminded him, "when you took your vows as sasennan.
From that moment, you had no grandfather. It is nothing to you which member of the Council has
spoken for this man's life, or why. Until that vote changes, he remains as he is."
Huddled in the shadows, Antryg had turned his face from the other wizards and covered it with
his hands, as if by so doing he could hide from them. Twice Joanna had seen his fingers move
toward the iron collar, but he could not bring himself to touch it. His whole body shivered. She
thought he wept.
The hearth fire had sunk to a bed of rubies on powdery ash. The smith and his apprentice had
already departed. In the blood colored glare, the Bishop gave that crumpled form one last scornful
glance and followed, with her black clothed guards about her; the wizards faded back into the
shadows from whence they had come. For a time Caris alone remained, looking after them, his face
like carved bone dyed by the sinking embers, motionless but for the somber glint of his eyes.
Then he turned and walked to where Antryg lay.
The wizard was silent. Only by the shaky draw and release of his breath could Joanna tell that
he was alive at all or conscious. The rags of his robe had been pulled down off his shoulders; in
the dull carmine light, she could make out the angles of scapula and vertebrae under taut, fine-
textured white skin.
Caris knelt beside him and drew his dagger. At the noise, Antryg raised his head, struggling
up against some great weight of despair. Seizing him by the shoulder, the young man thrust him
back against the stones of the wall. Coppery reflections of the fire glinted on the long blade, on
the sweat that ran down Antryg's face and chest, and on the evil jewels in the iron and lead of
the collar.
For a time Antryg looked, not at the blade that hung inches from his naked throat, but at the
sasennan's eyes. Then very slowly he brought up his hands, and Joanna saw that his fingers were
all splinted and bandaged, swollen as if every joint had been dislocated. Gritting his teeth
slightly against the pain, with the edge of one wrist he pushed back the sleeve of his robe to
expose ropy muscle and veins tracked to the elbows with whitened scars.
"Please," he said softly. "I'd take it as a great favor."
In one savage move Caris hurled him aside and jerked upright to stand over him. For that
instant, no matter how many times Joanna had dreamed this scene, she thought that he would kick
Antryg with fury and frustration and hate. But he turned on one booted heel and snapped the dagger
back into its sheathe. The firelight blinked on its hilt as he strode into the darkness of the
doorway, leaving Antryg lying alone, like a broken scarecrow in the gathering dark.
After a long time, the wizard crawled to his feet. Holding himself upright against the walls
with his bandaged hands, he stumbled toward the door and beyond its darkness to the stair that led
to his prison in the Silent Tower above.
The bus lurched to a stop at the gates of San Serano, and Joanna got out. The shuddering heat
of the day radiated through the soles of her battered hightop sneakers from the asphalt as she
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crossed the parking lot to Building Six; the empty hills that surrounded the plant loomed like
brownish cardboard cutouts in the smog.
You mustn't think about Antryg, she told herself wearily. Not of the lightness of those big
hands as he'd taught her to drive Prince Cerdic's carriage nor those evenings they'd spent at the
posthouses along the road from Kymil to Angelshand, drinking ale and talking. Not the tones of
that remarkable voice, deep and beautiful like some lunatic Shakespearean actor's nor the
desperate heat of his lips against hers. That was one thing nobody ever mentioned, she thought
wryly—that the obverse side of learning to care for someone was that you couldn't stop caring when
it hurt.
The straps of the heavy backpack cut into her shoulder. It contained a variety of things,
mostly bought out of money pilfered by computer from Gary's various illegal bank accounts—bank
accounts he had filled by computer theft from financial institutions across the United States.
She'd found everything about them—account numbers, amounts, even the break in program he'd modemed
into all those banking computers after hours—in the programs of his personality in the DARKMAGE
files. It hadn't taken much tinkering to help herself. Gary and Suraklin between them—between him?
she couldn't help wondering—had done a good deal of evil. She considered it only right that they
should finance her expedition to free Antryg—And he is alive! she insisted desperately to herself.
He is! and defeat Suraklin's plan.
She couldn't go on fighting him alone.
So she'd bought cultured pearls and synthetic sapphires and rubies, beef jerky and Granola
bars, a lightweight water bottle and a six inch sheathe knife to go with the Swiss Army knife she
already had, duct tape, nylon cord, a bundle of plastic coated copper wire, carbide hacksaw
blades, and various other supplies. From a pair of costumers she knew who catered to the
Renaissance Faire crowd, she'd ordered a gown made to the best of her recollections that would
pack small, but, once unpacked, would allow her to pass inconspicuously in a society that frowned
upon women wearing trousers. The thought of passing herself off as a boy, as so many romantic
heroines seemed able to do, had crossed her mind, but one glance in the mirror put the kibosh on
that one.
She'd bought a .38 Colt Diamondback and a cleaning kit and had practiced until the blasting
roar and the kick no longer twitched at her aim. She had toyed with the notion of going to one of
the jock hackers she knew for some kind of portable induction coil simply to degauss the stolen
computer's circuits; but from what she had read of its specs, she knew its shielding was up to
anything a battery was likely to generate, and there was no guarantee she'd be able to tap into
the computer's magical electrical source herself. The idea of high explosive she'd simply
discarded; aside from the legal restrictions entailed in acquiring it, she knew herself to be far
too inexperienced to use or transport it with anything resembling safety.
But input is input. If Gary—Suraklin—could transfer programs from the San Serano mainframe to
his new computer, so could she. So in a special pocket of her backpack, reinforced with metal and
wrapped in layer after layer of plastic, was her best and most illegal wipe the disk worm program.
For the rest, her backpack was jammed with hardcopy. Some of it photo-reduced and Xeroxed
almost to illegibility, some merely shoved in at random as it came off the modem lines that she
hadn't even had time to look at. She'd been hacking into the DARKMAGE files for a month; but owing
to the sheer volume of them, there had been so little time. So little time, she thought—but more
than enough for Antryg to be...
Stop that! she ordered herself. Antryg is alive. He has to be. He has to...
And if he wasn't, she knew, with cold and sinking dread, she'd have to stop Suraklin herself.
They'd already shut down most of the lights in Building Six. Very quietly, Joanna moved down
the blue carpeted corridors of the empty typing pools, between programmers' deserted cubicles. She
had stolen back into San Serano this way at least twice a week for the last month, and it always
brought up in her a variety of emotions; but paramount, horrifying, in her mind was the knowledge
that Suraklin still needed her. He had kidnapped her once before when he was planning to take over
Gary's body, and knew he'd need a programmer in his universe under his influence to take Gary's
place. Rather, he had gotten Gary to kidnap her and had himself taken her across the Void. Had
Antryg not been following him, she would even now be the Dark Mage's helpless puppet and slave.
Almost the last thing Antryg had said to her when they'd finally taken him was to warn her.
And of course she hadn't listened.
Nearly ill with the violence of her hammering heart, she walked swiftly along those darkened
halls. If he met her now, he'd have her, and every step she took closer to the Main Computer Room
made her danger worse.
Relax, she commanded shakily. You've done this a dozen times.
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She was still shaking all over by the time she slipped into one of the programming cubicles
across the hall from the mainframe.
You've done this a dozen times...
Left work with everyone else, to stash your car in a parking lot, en route, but never the same
parking lot, and sneaked back here by bus to take a roundabout way back into the plant to wait...
Spent your time raiding computer files and toting around twenty pounds of backpack...
Altogether, she thought wryly, to quiet the shakiness in her chest, this had damn well better
not be a hallucination after all.
She felt a little like a white robed cultist who, having sold everything he owns, stands
expectantly on his mountaintop, awaiting the end of the world. And I'm going to feel just as
silly, she added, trudging down home again...
Feet swished softly on the carpet outside. Joanna flattened her body against the wall behind
the cubicle's half open door and angled her head sideways to look through its crack. For one
flashing instant she identified Gary as he passed.
The Gary who was no longer Gary now, in the absence of anyone who had known Gary, didn't
bother to keep up the pretense. In spite of years of conscientious weight lifting, Gary—of medium
height and slender build, despite a recent tendency toward paunchiness—had never looked
particularly comfortable with his body. He walked now with an animal grace subtly at odds with the
sensible gray polyester trousers and the pale quiana shirt.
Joanna saw he was carrying a briefcase, and her heart turned perfectly cold within her.
It was, after all, going to be tonight.
She'd guessed it when she'd tapped into the DARKMAGE files early this morning and found large
sections of them gone. No modem lines stretched across the Void. He was doing his programming on
the San Serano mainframe, but he had to transfer his files across the Void by hand.
She felt the terrified urge to cry. Don't think about it, she told herself severely and
tiptoed soundlessly across the darkened cubicle to the phone. To her infinite relief, she got
Ruth's answering machine. It had been a good bet she would—Ruth was rarely home—but the last thing
she wanted right now was questions.
She said, simply, "Ruth, this is Joanna. Use your key to my place. There's a manila envelope
on the table, with some instructions. Please carry them out. I'll explain when I see you, but that
might not be for a few weeks. I'm not in any trouble. 'Bye."
Paranoid, schizo, obsessive, insane.
Why does it have to be me?
Antryg, she thought, must have felt the same.
Then something changed in the air. It was a sensation she would have been totally unable to
describe—an unreasoning terror, a strange tingling of the nerves, a sense of standing on a beach
whose shoreline is not water but the black drop off into eternity. But once felt, it could not be
mistaken for anything else. Dark winds seemed to whisper across her bones; she felt she could hear
the murmuring echoes of unknown forces, moving in blackness.
The Void between the universes was being bridged. Suraklin was going across.
She was keyed to the shaking point as she slid out the cubicle door. 1 can't let Suraklin see
me, she thought desperately. As of now I've disappeared and left a plausible story for why I won't
be seen for a couple of weeks. No one will look for me.
But of course, if Suraklin took her now, it wouldn't matter if the search started tomorrow. No
one would find her until she returned, her mind not her own.
Cold white light poured through the computer room door into the darkened corridor. The
backpack with the purse strapped to it now dragged her shoulders, but she scarcely noticed. She
thought, quite reasonably, There's a nine o'clock bus back to Encino... and put her head around
the door.
And the good news is, she thought half hysterically, it wasn't all a hallucination.
That is, unless I'm having a hallucination now.
There was darkness in the computer room.
Darkness, hideously, surrounded by the fluorescent blaze of the lights; like a cloud of gas,
but definitely not a vapor, not a substance at all. A darkness that seemed to stretch away, never
reaching the rear wall with its banks of green eyed monitor lights, but seeming to extend far past
it, a ghostly corridor that stretched to the abysses of infinity. Far off, along that great gulf
of nothing, she sensed movement.
There was no one now in the computer room. At its edges, the darkness was already beginning to
disperse.
And the bad news is...
. . . It wasn't all a hallucination.
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And you're going to have to walk into it.
A small voice within her suggested timidly, Can't I just go home and forget the whole thing?
Not allowing herself to think any further about that very real option, Joanna strode forward
into that darkness.
CHAPTER II
It was beyond a doubt the most frightening thing she had ever done. She hadn't gone two steps
when she wanted to turn around and go back, but she knew already she dare not even look over her
shoulder to see if it were possible. Far in the lightless Void ahead of her
Gary's—Suraklin's—yellow polyester shirt was a flitting blur. If she lost sight of that, she would
be lost indeed.
Vertigo swamped her, the sensation of falling, the terror of feeling nothing beneath her feet.
She struggled forward, half running, half swimming, tractionless and desperate to keep that pale
will o' the wisp in sight, smothering in darkness such as she had never known. Tears burned her
eyes, tears of terror and resentment. When she had gone through to that other world the first time
she had been unconscious; coming back, Salteris'—Suraklin's—thin, strong hand had been her guide.
Don't think, she told herself. Caris could follow a man through the Void unguided, you can,
too. Cold that was not really cold was leeching the strength from her veins. She ran/swam/flew
through the darkness, fighting frantically not to lose sight of the man who would destroy her if
he found her now.
The darkness was alive. She knew it, felt it, sensed the vast amorphous things that floated in
that frozen emptiness; she heard the dry, glittery whisper of something close behind. Panting,
wheezing breath, she wondered, or her own desperate gasping as she struggled to keep Suraklin in
sight? Her sweat, dripping from her hair in icy droplets, cold on the bare flesh of her arms,
or... ?
She ran harder, sobbing, not daring to look behind her. Only the fact that she could not stop
to get her breath prevented her from screaming Suraklin's name, pleading with him to come back and
fetch her. If he needed her services as Antryg had said, he couldn't let her be lost in the Void.
He was gone.
Darkness was around her, wind—or something else—clawing the ends of her flying hair. There was
no blur ahead of her, only plunging darkness, livid with the sense of writhing things. Far off to
her right, something bright caught her eye, fragile, milky light, and she sensed the smell of
rain. Though it was nowhere near the direction she had last seen Suraklin, she veered toward it,
running as she had never run before, running in heartbursting panic, with the pack dragging her
shoulders, like the weighted flight of nightmare. Something swooped at her, some winged and flabby
thing whirling out of the aphotic pits of this nonbeing; she felt it cut her arm, felt blood hot
on the cold flesh. She didn't look, only ran harder. Time had stopped; she felt as if she had been
running for hours, aimless and in terror. What if she had been? she wondered frantically. What if
the light before her vanished as Suraklin had? What if it was only a lure? What if she never got
out, if this would go on until she died? What if she didn't die? Her hair tangled in her eyes, the
pack was dragging on her, pulling her back, and the light was drifting away, fainter and
fainter...
Then it was clear before her, a white moon burning full and clear in a wide flung double ring
of ice mists above a broken line of standingstones. Sodden grasses whipped Joanna's calves as she
ran; cold sliced her arms, damp and raw. Behind her she heard the chitter and hiss that had filled
her ears in the Void. Risking a glance over her shoulder, she saw it, as much of it as there was
to see—something dark and floating, a chitinous tangle of long, knobby legs, with moonlight edging
an aureole of floating tendrils like a woman's long hair in water. The tendrils reached out toward
her, and, in the knot of darkness at the creature's center, things like specks of faceted glass
caught the moonlight.
Her mind blurred with terror she ran, stumbling on the rough rise of the ground, racing until
she felt her heart must burst toward the staring silver eye of the moon. She had the confused
impression that, if she could get her back to one of the bigger standing stones, she might at
least have some chance. Where she had come through the Void, they were only low stumps, like
broken fenceposts along the ancient path, if anything remained of them at all. Even as she ran,
she cursed herself. Her knife was in her pack; she'd never get it out in time. Caris would never
let himself get caught like this —
She flung herself against the nearest of the large stones, the pitted surface tearing at her
hands. Blind with horror, she scrabbled at her pack and ripped free the velcro pocket. The blood
was hot on her arm where the creature had cut her. In another second all those dangling claws
would be on her. She dropped the pack and jerked the knife free of its sheathe, the blade jamming
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in its newness. Any second... Any second...
Barely able to breathe, she flattened back against the stone and faced her adversary.
It was gone.
It was out there in the darkness; she knew it, felt it, and could almost hear its faint,
crackling whisper. But there was another sound, a muffled, rumbling thud in the earth, a groan.
She spun around, looking down the track into the moonwashed slot between the stones.
A rustling, moving shadow spread over the ground like water. Even with the thin lucency of the
moon, it was hard to distinguish shapes, but after a moment she heard the groan again, deep and
plaintive, and realized it was the lowing of a cow. Sheep bleated. Straining her eyes, Joanna
could make them out now in the shadow: cloudy blobs of whitish wool; the blunted spark of brass
horn tips; and a vertical shape that could only be a walking man. Sweet, cold, and unbearably
lonely, music curled like a black ribbon into the night, a haunted piping that threaded its way
like wind between the stones. Like a counterpoint against the thudding of her heart, she heard the
hollow pat of a drum.
Somewhere beyond the line of stones, out in the huge gulf of blackness that lay like a single
velvet entity up to the glowing violet hem of the hillcrowded sky, the abomination waited.
Joanna remembered Antryg saying that whenever the Void was breached the whole fabric of the
universe weakened; holes appeared not only in the vicinity of the Gate, but elsewhere in other
universes, and through these holes abominations would drift. In veering from Suraklin's route, she
might have stumbled through a hole opened along one of the energy tracks that crossed the Empire
of Ferryth. Or, she thought with a shiver, she might have fallen through to some other universe
altogether, neither her own nor the one she sought.
Fine, she thought, with half hysterical irony. I've managed to screw up before I even got
through the void.
She stepped cautiously back out of the main track between the stones, keeping her body still
pressed to the icy, uneven surface of the menhir, the cold making her hands ache around the
unaccustomed handle of the knife. The bobbing darkness down the track was coming nearer, resolving
itself into a blur of dark shapes and green eyes flashing queerly in the moonlight. She smelled
dung and dust in the sweetness of the trampled grass; fragile and terrible, the aching, single
voice of the pipe tugged at her heart.
A sheep passed her, then a cow with a yearling calf. More cows followed, jostling one another,
one of them so close she could feel the warmth of its body, then sheep in a dusty choke of wool
smell and hay. Dogs trotted between them, silent; then goats, a couple of pigs, a plowhorse the
size of a Panzer tank, with a small boy walking nearly hidden in its shadow along that dark and
silent track toward the moon. Other men and women walked among the animals, silent as they in the
false, quicksilver light; dogs trotted at their master's heels, and half-grown girls carried cats
in their arms.
In the trampled wake of the beasts walked a line of men, heads dark and disfigured by the
horned beast masks they wore. There was something indescribably lonely and terrible about the
dirge they played, like no music Joanna had ever heard, mourning for something no one understood
anymore. The black horns bobbed and swayed in the ashy moonlight. Under the jutting muzzles
gleamed the silvery reflection of masked eyes. If they saw her as they passed her, standing
shivering in the black pool of moonshadow, they gave no sign.
Last of all she saw what she thought was a catafalque made up from a farm wagon, drawn by cows
and sheep, though it was almost impossible to tell in the darkness. She thought that on it lay the
body of a man, eyes shut, face and hands blackened, clothed in rags, with a deer's antlers fixed
to his dark forehead. She seemed to hear Antryg's deep voice: "All things travel along the lines,
resonating forward and back... On certain nights of the year the peasants still drive their herds
along them, in commemoration of the Dead God, though they've forgotten why he died..."
Well, at least, Joanna thought wryly, I've come to the right world.
Fine. Now you have to worry about Suraklin.
Her first impulse was to follow eventually back to their village, to them, knowing they would
lead her shelter and warmth for the night. It was bitterly cold—belatedly, Joanna remembered that,
for all its damp and smothering heat in midsummer, the Empire of Ferryth lay well to the north of
the latitudes of California. The thin windbreaker wadded in her backpack would be about as much
use to her as a pair of lace ankle sox. Swell. You not only screwed up while you got through the
Void, but you didn't do so good before you entered it, either.
But even as she moved to pick up her backpack and follow, Joanna glanced out into the
darkness, and saw something moving, like a floating spider, far out in the darkness, paralleling
the course of the stones. Moonlight tipped the end of a floating spun glass tendril. The
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abomination, too, was following the funeral of the Dead God.
Was it the music that drew it? she wondered. Or the smell and the heat of blood? She huddled
down again, her back to the blue black shadow of the eroded stone, trembling as she pulled the
useless windbreaker from her pack and prepared to wait out the night. Far off, like the voices of
the dead, the pipes cried alone in the darkness.
Had it not been for the abomination, Joanna might have backtrailed the swathe of trampled
grass and animal dung back to the village from which the macabre procession had set out. She felt
cold and hungry and, once the first rush of adrenaline seeped from her veins, exhausted; even if
the villagers had left watchdogs prowling around their homes, even if they weren't likely to
welcome a stranger snooping about the place in their absence, surely she could take refuge in some
friendly haybarn until dawn. But the thought of being in any enclosed place in this black
gloom—the thought of being without a clear line of sight in all directions and something
absolutely solid at her back—gave her a shrinking feeling in the pit of her stomach; she huddled
all the tighter into her thin jacket and stayed where she was. The long trough of the energy
track, marked only here and there with an occasional small menhir in the direction of the village,
but as visible in the wan moonlight as a paved highway, stretched away into the shadowy hills. It
was a long walk, not knowing what might drift above or behind her in the dark.
The depression, when it came, turning the fragile beauty of the moonlight to flint, even as it
sucked the hope from Joanna's soul, made everything a thousand times worse.
Joanna knew what it was and had been expecting it. After all, Suraklin had crossed the Void to
use his computer on this side of it, and the computer fed on electricity converted by relays of
teles balls from the energy, the hope, and the life force of every human being in her own world,
this one, and who knew how many besides.
She, at least, was aware now that the numbness in her soul was externally caused, not the
result of some fading within herself, and that put her ahead of literally every other victim of
the computer's far reaching field. It didn't help, of course. She was still tormented by the
knowledge that she would fail and that what she did was pointless and would result, at best, in
her permanent exile to this inconvenient, smelly world and, at worst, in her death or enslavement.
She felt a growing conviction that Antryg was, in fact, long dead. It had been a month and more
since the wizards had taken him. Even worse was the part of her that shrugged and said, "So what?"
That part of her was seized with an impatience to get up and set out through the darkness for the
village, half forgetting, as an alcoholic forgets his last bender when the liquor fumes rise to
his nose, that the abomination was somewhere out there. It's following them—it won't get me, she
thought, resentment at her chapped hands and cramped knees flooding her, and only a mechanical
resolution to do everything completely by the numbers made her stay where she was.
When a steel colored dawn finally gave her a clear enough view of the surrounding countryside
to make sure she was absolutely unthreatened and unobserved from any direction in the crowding
shoulders of the hills, she got stiffly to her feet and changed into her dress—not particularly
easy to do while keeping an eye on the landscape. The depression that choked her soul like sifted
ash had not abated. Since this was Saturday, she didn't particularly expect it to.
Gary—Suraklin—would undoubtedly continue his programming all morning and into the afternoon, and
there would most likely be another such spell tomorrow.
At least, she thought, viewing the bony landscape of granite hills beneath its thin garment of
rusty autumn grass, I seem to have come to the right place. But Antryg had said that the Sykerst,
the rolling, barren lands of steppe and moor and waving lakes of grass through which they had
walked from Kymil to Angelshand that summer, stretched two thousand miles to the east of the more
populous areas of the Empire. If she were somewhere in the Sykerst—and these hills looked exactly
similar to those she remembered—she could easily be anywhere in them.
Please don't let me be fifteen hundred miles from the nearest civilization, she prayed
drearily, hoisting her backpack to her shoulder and cursing herself for filling it with paper.
Gimme a break, for Chrissake. This is going to be tough enough.
As she trudged down the trampled path of the Dead God and his followers, the hem of her
petticoat swirling around the hightop sneakers she had decided would be better for walking in, the
other half of her mind retorted, Don't bitch, baby, you made it to the right universe, didn't you?
Did I?
I should have taken that nine o'clock bus back to Encino. Oddly enough, a glance at her watch
sometime in the course of the night had showed her that, though it had felt as if she had run
through the Void for at least half an hour, the time had not registered on her watch at all. As
near as she could calculate, she had emerged a few minutes before nine o'clock—precisely the same
time that she had stepped in.
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摘要：

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