The Windrose Chronicles 2 - The Silicon Mage by Hambly Barbara

Author:Hambly, Barbara
Language: eng
Format: epub

The spells were a deeper magic than Caris had ever before attempted, almost beyond his grasp; even shaping them in his mind, without putting his power into them, left him exhausted as after hard training. It was the discipline of his training that got him through, learning them as he would have learned a new sword form, and Antryg, trained as a sasennan himself, cast the lesson in those terms, the terms that Caris would unthinkingly understand.

Oddly, Caris trusted him. Antryg was clearly as mad as hatters got after years of breathing the mercury fumes of their trade, tricky, devious, and marked, far back in his soul, by all the dark abominations of Suraklin's magic.

Yet for reasons he did not fathom, Caris had felt drawn to the wizard from their first meeting and, though he knew he ought to guard himself, felt little hesitation in opening his soul to the scrutiny of those daft gray eyes.

Using the magic itself was like flying.

His power was slight, and nothing he or Antryg could ever do would increase its strength. But when the hemorrhaging started somewhere in the endless hell of the girl's childbirth, it took so little to reach in with his mind and close the ruptured vessels. Even that took all his concentration, to focus and transmit the healing light from his own palms to the small, sweaty, twisting ones so desperately clutching at him, summoning the vision of it by rote until sweat ran down his face like rainwater, repeating to himself everything Antryg had said, making himself see, making himself believe... But the power came.

Antryg's voice drifted away somewhere, with the girl's terrified sobs. The blood smell was everywhere, sweetish-sharp in his nostrils as it had been the first time he had killed a man—a thief, bound hand and foot to the big stake in the rear court of the training-hall; Caris still remembered the color of the man's eyes. Through the woman's hands he felt her spirit, feeble and summery and rather stupid, hopeless in the grip of unimagined pain. When he felt that of her living daughter, the shock of it nearly made him lose his grip on the inner chain of light at which he clutched so hard.

Then he heard the child crying.

After it was all over, on one of the terraced balconies on the lee side of the house, heedless of the raw cold that had followed the sleety winds of the night, he put his forehead down on the wooden rail and wept as if his heart had been broken.

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