Barbara Hambly - Windrose 1 - The Silent Tower

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The Silent Tower

Barbara Hambly

[02 jun 2001 – scanned for #bookz, proofread and released – v1]

[thanks to tai-pan-up for the proofreading help!]

CHAPTER I

"HAS THE ARCHMAGE RETURNED?"

The wizard Thirle looked up sharply at Caris' question, strongly reminding the

young man of a fat gray field rabbit at the crack of a twig. Then he relaxed a little.

"Not yet." He picked up the garden trowel he'd dropped when Caris' shadow had

fallen over him on the brick steps of his house, where he had been kneeling. He got to

his feet with the awkward care of the very fat and dusted off his black robe. "Can I

help you?"

Caris hesitated, his right hand resting loosely around the hilt of the sword thrust

through his frayed silk sash. He cast a quick glance at the doorway of the house next

door. Like all the houses on the Mages' Yard, it rose tall, narrow, and

cramped-looking from the flagstones of the little court, dingy with age and factory

soot. Two or three of the other sasenna, the archaic order of sworn warriors, lingered,

waiting for him on the steps. Like him, they were clothed in the loose black garments

of their order, crisscrossed with sword sashes and weapons belts; and like him, they

were sweaty, bruised, and exhausted from the afternoon's session with the

swordmaster. He shook his head, and they passed into the shadows of the carved slot

of the doorway.

"I don't know." He turned back to Thirle, noting automatically, as a sasennan

must, the tiny details-the sweat on his brow, the twitch of his earth-stained

fingers-and wondered what it was that troubled him. "That is . . ."

The look of preoccupied nervousness faded from the fat man's eyes, replaced by

genuine concern. "What is it, lad?"

For a moment, Caris debated about simply shrugging the problem off, pushing

it aside as he had pushed it aside last night, and returning to the only matters which

should concern the sasennan; serving his masters the mages and bettering his own

skills in the arts of war. "I don't know whether I should be asking this or not," he

began diffidently. "I know it isn't the Way of the Sasenna to ask-a weapon asks no

questions of the hand that wields it. But . . ."

Thirle smiled and shook his head. "My dear Caris, how do we know what the

dagger thinks when it's sheathed, or what swords fear in the armory when the lights

are out? You know I've never approved of this business of the sasenna being-being

like those machines that weave cloth and spin thread in the mills, that do one job only

and don't care what it is."

Under the warm twinkle in his eyes Caris relaxed a little and managed a grin at

Thirle's heresy.

Of the dozen or more houses around that small cobble-stoned court on the edge

of the ghetto of the Old Believers, only eight actually belonged to the Council of

Wizards; of those, three were rented out to those-mostly Old Believers-who were

willing to live near wizards. Few mages cared to live in the city of Angelshand. Of

those few, Caris had always liked Thirle.

The Archmage, Caris' grandfather, had been absent since Caris had come out of

the morning's training. If he did not return before dinner, there was little chance Caris

would be able to speak with him until tomorrow.

It was not the Way of the Sasenna to fear, and Caris did not think he could

endure another unsleeping night with the secret of his fear gnawing his heart.

But having spent the last five years in rigorous training of muscle and nerves,

he was uncertain how to speak of fear. Nervously, he ran his scarred fingers through

his short-cropped blond hair, now stiff with the drying sweat of training. "I don't

know whether I should speak of this," he said hesitantly. "It's just that-A weapon

wasn't always what I was." He struggled with himself for a moment, then asked, "Is

there any way that a mage can lose his magic?"

Thirle's reaction was as unexpected as it was violent. A flush of anger mottled

the fat cheeks and layers of chin. "No!" He almost shouted the word. "We are born

with powers, some greater, some lesser. They are like our flesh, like our souls."

Confused at this rage, Caris began, "Not even . . ."

"Be silent!" Thirle's face had gone yellow as tallow now with fury. "You might

have been mageborn to begin with boy, but your powers never amounted to anything.

There's no way you could know about power. You are forbidden to speak of it.

Forbidden!" he added furiously, as Caris opened his mouth to explain.

To be sasenna is first to serve; when, after three years' grueling training in the

arts of war and the sneakier deaths of peacetime, Caris had made the last decision of

his life, he had sworn his warrior's vows to the Council of Wizards. The vows held

good. He closed his mouth, willing himself not to feel the scathe of astonished hurt,

and made himself incline his head.

His hands shaking, Thirle picked up his trowel and watering can and hurried

through the door of the house, slamming it behind him. Standing on the step, Caris

observed that the little wage had been so agitated that he'd left half his beloved

pot-plants, which clustered the step and every windowsill within reach, unwatered.

Across the city, the big clock on the St. Cdr fortress began striking five. Caris would

have less than an hour for dinner before going on duty in the refectory when the

wages ate.

Confused, Caris moved down the step with the sasennan's lithe walk. He felt

shocked and stung, as if he had been unexpectedly bitten by a loved old dog; but then,

he reflected a little bitterly, it was not the Way of the Sasenna to pat even a loved and

toothless old dog without one hand on one's knife. He made his way to the house next

door that was shared by the novice wages and the sasenna of the Council with the

frightening chill that lay in his heart unassuaged.

It was years since Caris had even thought of himself as mageborn. He was

nineteen, and for five years he had given himself, heart and soul, to the Way of the

Sasenna. But he had originally entered it, as many mageborn did, only as the gateway

to greater learning which had never materialized.

His powers, he knew, had never been much-a sharpness of sight in the dark and

a certain facility for finding lost objects. In his childhood he had desperately wanted

to become a wage and to take the vows of the Council of Wizards in order to serve

and be with his grandfather, who even then had been the Archmage. From studying

the Way of the Sasenna as a means to an end, it had become an end in itself; when he

had realized, as he eventually had, that his powers were insufficient to permit him to

become a wizard, he had remained as a sasennan. When it had come time to take his

warrior's vows, it was to the Council that he had taken them.

Was that why Thirle had refused to reply? he wondered. Because Cans, having

what he had, had turned from it?

It might have explained his refusal to answer, but, thought Caris uneasily, it did

not explain the note of fear in his voice.

At dinner that night Thirle was absent-odd, for though the wizards in general

ate plainly, the little botanist was still very fond of the pleasures of the table.

There were seven wizards and two novices who lived in the Court. The fourteen

sasenna who served them regularly traded off dinner duty, some serving, some

standing guard, as there were always sasenna standing guard somewhere in the

Yard-a few still sleeping, or just waked and ready to go on night watch. Though few

of the thieves and cutpurses that swarmed the dark slums of Angelshand would go

near the Yard, the mageborn had long ago learned that it never paid to be completely

unguarded.

A little uneasily, Caris noted that the Archmage had not yet returned. His place

at the high table had been taken by the Lady Rosamund, a beautiful woman of about

forty, who had been born Lady Rosamund Kentacre. Her father, the Earl Maritime,

had disowned her when she had sworn the vows of the Council of Wizards-not, Caris

had heard rumored, because in doing so she had revealed herself to be mageborn in

the first place, but because the vows precluded using her powers to benefit the

Kentacre family's political ambitions. Undoubtedly the Earl had known-his daughter

had been nearly twenty when she had sought out the Council-and had probably

arranged to have her secretly taught in the arts of magic by one of the quacks or dog

wizards who abounded in such numbers in any major city of the Empire. But for Lady

Rosamund, the half-understood jumble of piesog, hearsay, and garbled spells used for

fees by the dog wizards had not been enough. To obtain true teaching, she must take

the Council Vows, the first of which was that she must never use what she had

learned either to harm or to help any living thing.

"He should never have gone without a guard," she was saying, as Caris bore a

tray of duck and braided breads up to the high table.

Beside her, the thin, tired-looking Whitwell Simm protested, "The Regent

wouldn't dare . . ."

"Wouldn't he?" Cold fire sparked in her green glance. "The Prince Regent hates

the mageborn, and always has hated us. I'm told that the other night, after a ball in the

city, he was getting into his carriage when an old man, a shabby old dog wizard,

accidentally brushed up against him on the flagway. Prince Pharos had two of his

sasenna hold the old man while he almost beat the poor wretch to death with his cane.

The rumors of what goes on in the dungeons of the old Summer Palace, which he has

taken for his own, are a scandal. He is as mad as his father."

"The difference being," remarked Issay Bel-Caire on her other side, "that his

father is not dangerous, except perhaps to himself."

At the foot of the table, the two novices-a short, redhaired girl of seventeen or

so and a creamily dark, thin girl a few years older-said nothing, but listened with

uneasy avidity, knowing that this was not merely gossip, but something which could

easily affect their lives. Near them old Aunt Min, the most ancient of the mages who

dwelt in the Yard, sat slumped like a little black bag of laundry in her chair, snoring

softly. With a smile of affection for the old lady, Caris woke her gently up; she lifted

her head with a start and fumbled at the tangle of her eternal knitting with hands as

tiny and fragile as a finch's claws, muttering to herself all the while.

Whitwell Simm said, "Even if the Prince hates us, even if he believes our magic

is nothing but charlatanry, like that of the dog wizards, you know he'd never dare to

harm the Archmage. Neither the Council nor, as a matter of fact, the Church, would

permit it. And we don't know that Salteris has gone to the Palace . . ."

"With the Regent's sasenna everywhere in the city," retorted Lady Rosamund

coolly, "it scarcely matters where he goes. Prince Pharos is a madman and should

have been barred from the succession long ago in favor of his cousin."

Issay laughed. "Cerdic? Maybe, if you want quacks and dog wizards like

Magister Magus ruling the Empire."

Her ladyship's aristocratic lip curled at the mention of the most popular

charlatan in Angelshand, but she turned her attention to her plate with her usual air of

arctic self-righteousness, as if secure in the knowledge that all opposing arguments

were specious and deliberately obstructive.

Caris, clearing up the plates afterwards and getting ready for the one last

training session with the other sasenna which the incredible length of the midsummer

evenings permitted, felt none of the wizards' qualms for his grandfather's safety. This

was not so much because he did not believe the mad Regent capable of anything-by

all accounts he was-but because Caris did not truly think anyone or anything capable

of trapping or harming his grandfather.

Since Caris was a child, he had known Salteris Solaris as his grandfather, a

mysterious man who visited his grandmother's farm beyond the bounds of their

Wheatlands village, sometimes twice in a summer, sometimes for the length of a

winter's storm. He had known that afterwards his mother's mother would sing at her

household tasks for weeks. The old man's hair had been dark then, like that of Caris'

mother-Caris took after the striking blond beauty of his slow-moving, good-natured

father. But Caris had the Archmage's eyes, deep brown, like the dark earth of the

Wheatlands, the color of the very old leaves seen under clear water, tilted up slightly

at their outer ends. For a time, it had seemed that he had inherited something else

from him besides. When he had taken his vows as sasennan to the Council, it had

been with the aim of serving the old man as a warrior, if he did not have the power to

do so as a wizard. Only lately had it come to him that there would be a time when it

would not be the old man who was its head.

Caris was too much a sasennan even to think about his grandfather, or the secret

fear which he had carried within him, during that evening's training. With the endless,

tepid twilight of midsummer filtering through the long windows of the training floor

on the upper storey of the novices' house, the swordmaster put the small class through

endless rounds of practice sparring with split bamboo training swords. Ducking,

parrying, leaping, pressing, and retreating under the continuous raking of barked

instruction and jeers, in spite of five years of hard training Caris was still sodden with

sweat and bruised all over by the time he was done, convinced he'd never be able to

pick up a sword again. He was familiar with the sensation. In that kind of training,

there was no room for any other thought in the mind; indeed, that was part of the

training—to inculate the single-mindedness critical to a warrior, the hair-trigger

watching for the flick of an opponent's eyelid, the twitch of the lip or the finger, that

presaged a killing blow . . . or sometimes the sense of danger in the absence of any

physical sign at all.

By the time it was too dark to see, it was past ten o'clock, and Caris, exhausted,

stumbled with the other sasenna back downstairs to bathe and collapse into bed. It

wasn't until he was awakened by he knew not what in the tar-black deeps of the night

that he remembered his grandfather and what he had wanted to ask of him, and by

then it was too late.

His magic was gone.

Long before, Caris had given up his belief in his magic. Only now, lying in the

warm, gluey blackness, did he understand how deeply its roots had run and how

magic had made the skeleton of his very soul. Without it, life was nothing, a hollow,

gray world, not even bitter. It was as if all things had decayed to the color and texture

of dust-as if the color had been bled even from his dreams.

He had heard the mages speak in whispers of those things by which a mage's

power could be bound-spell-cord and the sigils made of iron, gold, or cut jewels,

imbued with signs that crippled and drained a wizard's powers, leaving him helpless

against his foes. But there was nothing of that in this terrible emptiness. His soul was

a mold with the wax melted out, into which no bronze would ever be poured-only

dust, filling all the spaces where the magic had been.

He would have wept, had the Way of the Sasenna not forbidden tears.

Unable to bear the hot, close darkness of the sasenna's dormitory another

moment, he pulled on his breeches and shirt and stumbled downstairs to the door. The

Way of the Sasenna whispered to him that he ought also to put on his boots and his

sword belt; but with the loss of his magic, all things else seemed equally trivial and

not worth the doing. The fresher air out on the brick steps revived him a little. Across

the narrow, cobblestoned Yard, he could hear the sleepy twittering of birds under the

eaves of the houses opposite. Among the squalid alleyways of the Old Believers'

ghetto, a cock crowed.

Thirle had said that it could not happen-ever. But it had happened to him last

night, a few moments' sickening waning that had wakened him, his heart pounding

with cold terror. It was something he knew even then should not happen, as Thirle

had said . . . And now magic was gone completely.

He leaned against the carved doorframe, hugging himself wretchedly,

wondering why he could feel almost nothing, not even real grief-just a kind of

hollowness that nothing, throughout the length of his life, would ever again fill.

Looking across to the tall, narrow windows of his grandfather's little house, he

wondered if the old man had returned. The windows were dark, but that would not

necessarily mean he was asleep-he often sat up reading without light, as the mageborn

could do. Perhaps he would know something Thirle did not.

But at the same time, it seemed pointless to speak of it now. Gone was gone.

Like his long-departed virginity, it was something, he told himself, that he would

never recover. To the west, a drift of noise floated from the more populous streets of

Angelshand, from the bawdy theaters on Angel's Island near the St. Cyr fortress, and

from the more elegant gaming halls near the Imperial Palace quarter. Carriage wheels

rattled distantly on granite pavement; voices yelled in all-night taverns.

Almost without thinking of it, Caris found himself descending the brick steps,

feeling for the purse in his breeches pocket, knowing he was going to go over to the

Standing Stallion and get drunk.

Get drunk? He stopped, surprised and disgusted with himself. There was no

stricture against the sasenna drinking. If need arose, Caris could hold his own against

most of his mates when they went to the taverns; but on the whole, he preferred to

remain sober. It was the Way of the Sasenna to be ready to fight at all times, and

Caris had never believed in blurring that edge.

But now none of it seemed to matter. He was dimly aware that what he wanted

was not the wine, but the numbing of his awareness of grief, and he knew also that it

would do him more harm than good. But, after a moment's hesitation, he sighed, not

even caring that he was unarmed and hadn't put on his boots, and continued down the

stairs.

As his bare foot touched the uneven cobbles of the court, he heard Thirle's voice

cry desperately. "NO!"

Five years of training had inculcated into Caris the automatic reaction of drop

and roll for cover until it was instinct. But now he stood, paralyzed like a stupid

peasant, in the waxy moonlight at the foot of the step as the fat black shape of the

wizard came stumbling out of a nearby alley, aptly named Stinking Lane. He saw the

man's round moonface clearly and the shocked panic in his eyes as Thirle began to

run clumsily across the court, arms outspread like a bird's wings for balance.

From the darkness on the opposite side of the Yard, Caris heard the crack of a

pistol.

Thirle rocked back sharply at the impact of the bullet, his feet flying out from

under him as he flopped grotesquely on the stones. A dark shape broke cover from the

shadows on the opposite side of the court, running toward Thirle, toward the mouth of

Stinking Lane behind him, a black cloak covering him like a wing of shadows. All

this Caris watched, but all of it, including the fact that he knew Thirle was dead, was

less to him than his grief for the loss of his magic. None of it mattered-none of it had

anything to do with him. But deep within him shock and horror stirred-at what was

happening and at himself.

In a daze of anger, he forced himself to run, to intercept that fleeing black

figure. He'd gone two steps when the digging bite of the cobbles on his bare feet

reminded him belatedly that he had neither boots nor weapons. Cursing the

carelessness and stupidity that seemed to be upon him tonight, he flung himself to one

side into the black pocket of shadow between the novices' house and Thirle's. From

across the court, he caught the flash of a pistol shot.

Splinters of brick exploded from the corner of the house, so close to his face

that they tore his cheek. He knew it would take his man some moments to reload and

knew he should dart out and take him then-but he hesitated, panic he had never

known clutching at his belly. He heard feet pounding the cobbles and forced himself

to stumble upright, to race in pursuit, but his legs dragged as if tangled in wet rope. It

meant nothing to him. His soul had turned as sterile and cold as the magicless world

around him. It would be easier to stop now, shrug, and go back to bed, Thirle's body

would still be there in the morning. Dully angry at himself, he made himself run. For

five years, in spite of exhaustion, occasional illness, and injuries, he had made himself

pick up the sword for training, but forcing himself now was more difficult than it had

ever been. In some oblique corner of his mind, he wondered if this were a spell of

some kind, but it was unlike any spell he had ever known.

His steps slowed. The fugitive leaped over Thirle's body and vanished into the

utter blackness of Stinking Lane. Caris dodged sideways, pressing against the house

wall and slipping forward to the corner, knees flexed, ready to drop if that hand with

its pistol appeared around the edge. The two shots had been so close together that the

killer must have had two weapons-both empty now-and possibly he had a third.

Through Caris' thin shirt, he felt the roughness of the coarse-plastered wall and the

dampness that stuck the thin fabric to his ribs with sweat. He found he was exhausted,

panting as if he had run miles.

He reached the mouth of the lane and looked around.

He saw nothing. No light-no walls-no sky. There was only a black and endless

hollow, an abyss that seemed to swallow time itself, as if not only the world, but the

universe, ended beyond the narrow band of pallid moonlight that lay on the cobbles

beneath his feet.

Terror tightened like a garrote around his throat. He had not felt that hideous,

nightmare fear since he had waked in the night as a small child to see the gleam of

rats' eyes winking at him in the utter dark of the loft where he slept. Staring into that

emptiness of endless nothing, he felt horror pressing upon him, horror of he knew not

what-the whisper of the winds of eternity along his uncovered bones. He pressed his

face to the stone of the wall, squeezing his eyes shut, unable to breathe. He felt in

danger, but his training, like his magic, had deserted him; he wanted to run, but knew

not in which direction safety would lie. It was not death he feared-he did not know

what it was.

Then the feeling was gone. Like a man dreaming, who feels even in sleep the

refreshing storm break the lour of summer heat, he felt the hideous weight of

hopelessness lift from him. Still pressed to the chill stone of the wall, Caris felt as if

he had waked suddenly, his heart pounding and his breathing erratic, but his mind

clear. His magic-that trace of intense awareness that all his life had colored his

perceptions-had returned. With it came a moment's blinding fury at himself for being

so child-simple as to wander abroad unarmed and barefoot.

His knees felt weak at the thought of what he knew he must do. It took all his

will to force himself to move forward again, crouching below eye level though he

knew that the man with the pistols was gone. It was the Way of the Sasenna never to

take chances.

Cautiously, he peered around the corner into the alley.

Filtered moonlight showed him the moss-furred cobbles, the battered walls of

the houses, and the glitter of noisome gutter-water in the canyon of dark. There was a

puddle right across the mouth of the lane, too wide to jump, but there were no prints

on the other side.

Caris turned back to where Thirle lay like a beached and dying whale in the

silver wash of the faint starlight. Lights were going up in the houses around the Yard,

and voices and footsteps made a muffled clamor on the edges of the darkness. As he

reached Thirle's side, Caris saw the dark glitter that covered all the breast of his robe.

With a guttural gasp, the fat man's body twitched, lungs sucking air desperately. Caris

fell to his knees beside him, and for one moment the dark, frantic eyes met his.

Then Thirle whispered, "Antryg," and died.

"The police must be fetched."

The Archmage Salteris Solaris, kneeling beside Thirle's body, made no reply to

the words of the skinny old swordmaster, who stood in the little cluster of men and

women, Old Believers and novices, all clutching bedclothes about them and looking

down at the body with the wild eyes of those startled by gunshots from sleep. Caris,

kneeling beside him, looked from the corpse's eyes, staring blindly now at the faint

pearliness of false dawn visible between the crowding black angles of the roofs, to the

thin, aquiline features of his grandfather. The old man's white brows were pinched

down over the bridge of his nose, and there was grief in his eyes for the loss of one he

had known for so many years—grief and something else Caris could not understand.

The old man glanced up at the crowd behind them and said "Yes-perhaps."

The Lady Rosamund, standing fully dressed even to the hyacinth stole of a

Council member-a mark of rank that the Archmage seldom wore sneered. As the

scion of one of the noblest houses in the land, she had little use for such bourgeois

institutions as the Metropolitan Police. "The constables will find some reason to wait

until light to come."

Salteris' thin mouth twitched in a faint smile. "Very likely." He looked back

down at the plump heap of black robes. In the soft glow of bluish witchlight that

illuminated the scene, hanging like St. Elmo's fire above his high, balding forehead

and flowing white hair, the muscles of his lean jaw tightened.

Something twisted inside Caris, and he put out a hand to touch the old man's

square, slender shoulder in comfort, but he remembered that he was sasenna and

stopped himself with the gesture unmade. He was used to death, as the sasenna must

be. He had killed his first man at fifteen; the schools of the sasenna were given

prisoners condemned to die by the Emperor or the Church, for even in peacetime,

they said, the sword blade must learn the taste of flesh. As the sworn weapon of the

Council of Wizards, he would have cut Thirle's throat himself, had they ordered it.

But still, it had been many years since anyone he had known personally had died. A

little to his shame, he found that the training had not changed that shocked grief of

loss, and anger stirred in him that anyone would cause the Archmage pain.

Salteris stood up, his black robes falling straight and heavy around his thin

form. For all his snow-white hair, for all the worn fragility that had begun to come

over him in the last few years, he took no hand to help him. "We should get him

inside," he said softly. He looked over at the two sasenna who had been on patrol duty

that night. When they opened their mouths to protest that they had been in the alleys

on the far side of the Yard, he waved them quiet. "It was no one's fault," he said

gently. "I believe Thirle was killed only because he was in the man's way as he fled

-perhaps because Thirle saw him and would give the alarm."

"No," a cracked, thin old voice said from the darkness of Stinking Lane. "You

forgot about the Gate-the Gate into the Darkness-the Gate of the Void . . ."

Salteris' head turned sharply. Caris stepped forward in a half-second of reflex,

readying himself to defend his grandfather, then relaxed once more as he recognized

the voice. "Aunt Min?"

From the shadows of Stinking Lane, the bent form of the old lady who had once

been known throughout the Council as Minhyrdin the Fair hobbled determinedly, her

black robes coming untucked from her belt and dragging in the puddles, her

workbasket with its everlasting knitting dangling haphazardly at her side.

Half-exasperated, half-concerned for the old lady, Caris hurried forward to take her

fragile arm.

"You shouldn't be up and about, Aunt Min. Not tonight . . ."

She waved the remark fussily away and twisted her head on her bent spine to

look up at Salteris and Lady Rosamund, who had also come to her side. "There is evil

abroad," she piped. "Evil from other worlds than this. Only a curtain of gauze

separates us from them. The Dark Mage knew . . ."

Salteris held up his hand quickly against that name, his silky white brows

plunging together. Caris glanced quickly from him to Aunt Min, who had returned to

fussing with the trailing strands of her knitting, and then back. "Other worlds?" he

asked worriedly. His eyes went unwillingly to the dark maw of the alley, an uneven

agglomerate of dim stone angles, with the gutter picking up the quicksilver light of

the sky like a broken sword blade. "But-but this is the world. There is no other. The

Sun and Moon go around us . . ."

Salteris shook his head. "No, my son," he said. "They've known for years now

that it is we who go around the Sun, and not the Sun around us, though the Church

hasn't admitted it yet. But that is not what Aunt Min means." He frowned unseeing for

a moment into the distance. "Yes, the Dark Mage knew." His voice sank to a whisper.

"As do L" He put his arm around the old lady's stooped shoulders. "Come. Before all

else, we must get him inside."

They sent one of the night-watch sasenna-the only two sasenna to be

dressed-for a physician. Rather to Caris' surprise, it was less than a half-hour before

he arrived. In the low-roofed closeness of the Archmage's narrow study, Caris was

telling Salteris, Lady Rosamund, and old Aunt Min of what he had seen-the

pistol-shots, the chase, the terrible Gate of Darkness-when he heard the swift tap-tap

of hooves in the Yard and the brisk rattle of what sounded like a gig. He was

surprised that any citizen of Angelshand would come to the Mages' Yard during the

dark hours, and even more so when the man entered the study. He had expected

Salteris to send for a healer of the Old Believers, whose archaic faith was still more

than a little mixed with wizardry. But the man who entered wore the dapper blue knee

breeches and full-skirted coat of a professional of the city.

"Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag." Salteris rose from the carved ebony chair in which he

had been sitting, extending a strong, slender hand. The physician took it and inclined

his head, his bright blue eyes taking in every detail of that small room, with its dark

ranks of books, its embryos bottled in honey or brandy, and its geometric models and

crystal prisms.

"I came as quickly as I could."

"There was no need for haste." Salteris gestured him to the chair that Caris

brought silently up. "The man was killed almost at once."

One of Skipfrag's sparse, sandy eyebrows tilted sharply up. He was a tall man,

stoutish and snuff-colored, with his hair tied back in an oldfashioned queue. In spite

of the fact that he must have been wakened by Salteris' messenger, his broad linen

cravat was neatly tied and his shirtruflies unrumpled.

"Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag," Salteris introduced. "Lady Minhyrdin, Lady

Rosamund-my grandson Caris, sasennan of the Council, who witnessed the shooting.

Dr. Narwahl Skipfrag, Royal Physician to the Emperor and my good friend."

As a sasennan should, Caris concealed his surprise. Few professionals believed

in the power of wizards anymore, and certainly no one associated with the Court

would admit to the belief these days, much less to friendship with the Archmage. But

Dr. Skipfrag smiled, and nodded to Lady Rosamund. "We have met, I think, in

another life."

As if against her will a slight answering smile warmed her ladyship's mouth.

Slumped in her chair, without raising her eyes from her knitting, Aunt Min

inquired, "And how does his Majesty?"

Skipfrag's face clouded a little. "His health is good." He spoke as one who

remarks the salvage of an heirloom gravy boat from the wreck of a house.

Lady Rosamund's full mouth tightened. "A pity, in a way." Salteris gave her a

questioning look, but Skipfrag merely gazed down at his own broad white hands. She

shrugged. "Good health is no gift to him. Without a mind, the man is better dead.

After four years, it is scarcely likely he will reawaken one morning sane."

"He may surprise us all one day," Skipfrag remarked. "I daresay his son thinks

as you do."

At the mention of the Prince Regent, Lady Rosamund's chilly green eyes

narrowed.

"It is about his son, in a way," Salteris cut in softly, "that I asked you here,

Narwahl. The man who was killed was a mage."

The physician was silent. Salteris leaned back in his chair, the glow of the

witchlight gleaming above his head and haloing the silver flow of his long hair. For a

time he, too, said nothing, his folded hands propped before his mouth, forefingers

extended and resting against his lips. "My grandson says that he heard Thirle cry

`No!' at the sight of a man standing in the shadows on this side of the court-the man

who shot him, fleeing to the alley across the yard. Caris did not see which house the

killer stood near, but I suspect it was this one."

The bright blue eyes turned grave. "Sent by the Regent Pharos, you mean?"

"Pharos has never made any secret of his hatred for the mageborn."

"No," Dr. Skipfrag agreed and thoughtfully stared into the witchlight that hung

above the tabletop for a moment. He reached out absentmindedly toward it and

pinched it, like a man pinching out a candle-his forefinger and thumb went straight

through the white seed of light in the glowing ball's heart, the black shadows of his

fingers swinging in vast, dark bars across the low rafters of the ceiling and the

book-lined walls. "Interesting," he murmured. "Not even a change in temperature."

His blue eyes returned to Salteris. "And that's odd in itself, isn't it?"

Salteris nodded, understanding. Caris, standing quietly in a corner, as was the

place of a sasennan, was very glad when Lady Rosamund demanded, "Why? Few

believe in our powers these days." There was bitter contempt in her voice. "They

work in their factories or their shops and they would rather believe that magic did not

exist, if they can't use it to tamper with the workings of the universe for their personal

convenience."

Softly, the Archmage murmured, "That is as it should be."

The deep lines around Skipfrag's eyes darkened and moved with his smile.

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TheSilentTowerBarbaraHambly[02jun2001–scannedfor#bookz,proofreadandreleased–v1][thankstotai-pan-upfortheproofreadinghelp!]CHAPTERI"HASTHEARCHMAGERETURNED?"ThewizardThirlelookedupsharplyatCaris'question,stronglyremindingtheyoungmanofafatgrayfieldrabbitatthecrackofatwig.Thenherelaxedalittle."Notyet."H...

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Barbara Hambly - Windrose 1 - The Silent Tower

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