All the Paths of Shadow (4 page)

Another airship, her fans swiveling and whirling, swooped ponderously down and blotted out the sun.

“Wondrous,” said Tervis.

Meralda smiled, and said nothing.

“Here we are, ladies and thaumaturges,” shouted Angis. “The Tower.”

Angis pulled his cab to the curb in the circle ’round that looped between Hent Street and the park’s east entrance. The Bellringers stared.
No wonder so many painters set up their easels here,
thought Meralda.

The park wall, ten miles of Old Kingdom rough hewn stone ravaged and worn by the passing of centuries, rose a full thirty feet above the well-tended grass of the park. The gargoyles mad king Foon had added in the second century still danced and capered and brooded atop the wall. The age-old tradition of tying ridiculous hats to the most fearsome of the gargoyles was, Meralda saw, still observed by Tirlin’s more daring youngsters. The pair of gargoyles flanking the gate-posts were sporting last year’s fruit-and-feather day hats, and the right-most fellow was wearing a jaunty pink Oaftree scarf.

Well above and just inside the wall and its gargoyles, the park’s ring of Old Kingdom iron oaks rustled and swayed, like thick green mountain peaks shuffling to and fro against a pale blue sky. Meralda loved the oaks, and though she knew the stories claiming Otrinvion himself planted the seedlings were utter nonsense, she couldn’t help but think those mighty old trees had watched Tirlin for a good portion of its clamorous history.

“Oh,” said Kervis, and Meralda knew from his face that he wasn’t seeing the wall or the Old Oaks or the line of dancing gargoyles.

“The captain says it’s haunted,” said Tervis, his eyes upon the Tower. Meralda put her bag in her lap and waited for the guardsman to notice that the cab had stopped.

“The thaumaturge says it isn’t,” said Meralda. “And she should know better, shouldn’t she?”

Tervis whirled, groping for the door latch. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Sorry, ma’am.”

Angis flung open the door from outside. Tervis yelped and would have fallen, had Angis not caught hold of his red uniform collar. “Here, lad,” said Angis. “First thing you’ve got to learn about is doors. See this here? It’s what we city folks call a latch.”

“Leave him be, Angis,” said Meralda.

“Aye, Lady,” said Angis, grinning. He reached up, caught Meralda’s black bag, and held her door. “Will you be long, this morning?”

“Two hours,” she said, stepping out onto the curb. “Then it’s off to the palace.”

“Got to greet our Eryan guests, aye?”

“Aye,” said Meralda, wincing at the thought of a long afternoon at court. “But first, I’ve got work to do. Gentlemen?”

The Bellringers looked down, away from the Tower.

“That is the Tower,” she said, as Angis tended his ponies. “It’s seven hundred years old. It was built by Otrinvion the Black, himself. You’ve heard the name?”

The Bellringers nodded in unison.

“The Tower is central to our history,” she said. “And the Tower has a long and bloody past. War and murder and madness. You’ve heard the stories of King Tornben the Mad? Queen Annabet the Torturer?”

The Bellringers exchanged glances, and Kervis nodded.

“The stories are true,” said Meralda. “Documented fact. But I tell you this, gentlemen, and I want you to remember it.” Meralda paused, shifted her bag from her left hand to her right, and waved back Kervis when he motioned to take the bag himself.

“The Tower is not haunted,” she said. “It was not, is not, and shall never be. Is that clear?”

The Bellringers nodded, slowly this time.

Angis grinned at his ponies, but didn’t say a word.

“Then let’s go,” said Meralda. “Follow me.”

She turned and set foot on the cracked flagstones of Wizard’s Walk, which led through the park’s east gate and then wound toward the Tower. The walk was, according to local lore, another of Otrinvion’s legacies.

The Bellringers, right hands on sword hilts, faces stern (except for Tervis, who kept wrinkling his forehead to push his helmet up), fell into step behind her.

“Keep a sharp eye out, lads,” said Angis, after Meralda passed into the park. “Especially after dark. That’s when the haunts get mean.” Angis lifted his voice. “Not that I believe such, mind you.”

Meralda listened to the steady tromp-tromp of newly soled guard boots and frowned. The Bellringers were marching, not walking.
Fresh out of boot camp,
she thought.
I’m sure they’re not even aware they’re doing it. I’ll be hearing the sound of marching boots from now until the Accords. That’s eighteen more days,
and every one of them my own small army dress parade.

The walk turned suddenly, leaving the shade of the old oaks for the close-cropped green grass of the park proper.

The Tower split the sky, no longer obscured by walls or oaks.

“Here it is, gentlemen,” said Meralda, halting. “The Tower.”

“It’s taller than the palace,” said Kervis.

Meralda shook her head. She knew the highest spire of the palace to be ten feet taller than the blunt tip of the Tower. Old King Horoled, a century past, had nearly bankrupted Tirlin seeing to that. But the palace was more than twenty city blocks away. One had to squint just to make out the lofty spire, which peeked above the trees.
The palace might be taller,
thought Meralda,
but here in the park, the Tower reigns.

Reigns?
No,
Meralda decided.
The Tower doesn’t reign. It looms. Looms above the Old Oaks. Looms above the park wall. Looms above Tirlin. Thick and tall and blunt, chipped and nicked by seven hundred years of determined attempts to pull it down, the Tower endures.

“If a mountain had bones,” said Tervis, “that’s what they’d look like.”

“Hush,” replied Kervis. “It’s just a pile of rocks.”

A lumber wain rumbled up the Walk behind them. “Passing by,” shouted the driver. “Make way.”

Meralda stepped onto the grass and motioned the Bellringers to follow.

The lumber wain rattled past.

Tervis pointed toward the hurried band of carpenters stacking lumber and erecting scaffolds at the base of the Tower.

“What are they building?”

Meralda frowned. “Seating,” she said. “For the Accords.”

Meralda resumed her trek toward the Tower, which lay a goodly march ahead. “The king will give the commencement speech from there,” she said, pointing toward the tall, narrow framework jutting out from the base of the Tower. “The Eryans will be there, the Alons there, the Phendelits there, and the Vonats just in front of us,” she said, her hand indicating the skeletal frames arranged around and dwarfed by the Tower. “All this, for a ten minute speech no one will remember the next day.”

“Kings will do what kings will do,” said Kervis, with the air of one repeating a time-honored truth. “At least that’s what Pop always says.”

“Ma’am,” he added, after a jab in the ribs from Tervis.

The Tower beckoned. Meralda fell into step with her soldiers and marched, humming, ahead.

The Tower doors, each twenty feet high and nearly as wide, were open, but blocked by a drooping length of bright yellow ribbon and a faded Danger Public Works sign bolted to a rusty iron stand.

Meralda waved to the Builder’s Guild foreman, lifted the yellow ribbon, and passed over the threshold.

Three steps on stone, and the last slanting rays of the sun gave way to darkness. Meralda squinted ahead, slowing until she could make out shapes in the shadows. “Be careful,” she said, as Tervis and Kervis entered. “The carpenters are stacking lumber in here.”

Meralda reached out and touched the wall to her right. The stone was cold. Like the outside of the Tower, the interior hall was stone. Solid black Eryan granite, shaped and fused into a single mass by a spell or spells known only to the Tower’s long-dead master. Cold and dry and as smooth as glass. Meralda knew just beyond the wall, the sun was shining, the park was green and lush, and Tirlin was bustling and busy. But here, in the windowless belly of the Tower, she felt as if it were the smallest hour of the longest, darkest night.

“It’s quiet, all of a sudden,” said Tervis, in a whisper. “Isn’t it?”

Meralda shrugged. Oh, the hammering and pounding and shouting continued, but the Tower doors might as well have been flung shut, so faint was the noise after only a few paces. And had the daylight fled so quickly, on her other visits?

“This way,” she said, when the Bellringer’s footfalls fell behind. “The hall is very short, and there are no turns.”

“No windows, either,” muttered Tervis. “Ma’am.”

“We won’t need windows,” said Meralda, groping in her bag. “We’ll have plenty of our own light.”

“Oh,” said Kervis. “Should I go back and fetch a lantern?”

Meralda pulled a short brass pipe from her bag. “Light,” she said, unlatching the simple magelamp spell coiled invisibly around the cylinder with the word.

The Bellringers whistled as wide beams of soft white light flared from each end of the brass tube.

“Wizard lamp,” said Tervis, lifting his hand to run his fingers through the light. “Uncle Rammis saw one, once. Nobody believed him.”

Meralda played the lamp around the hall. Shadows flew. Some, she thought, more slowly than others.

A shiver ran the length of Meralda’s spine.

“Nonsense,” she said, amazed and a bit embarrassed. “Utter nonsense.”

“Pardon, ma’am?” asked Kervis.

Meralda shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. We have a long flight of stairs to climb, gentlemen,” she said, striding toward the heart of the darkness at the end of the hall. “Shall we go?”

The Bellringers followed. Ten paces further Meralda’s lamplight fell across a crude table bearing half a dozen battered oil lanterns, an open box of Red Cat matches, and a half-eaten Lamp River apple.

Further down the hall, smooth-planed cedar planks were stacked neatly along each wall. Meralda thought she heard the sound of gentle snoring behind the third stack as she passed it, and her face reddened even more.
I can at least be thankful Mug isn’t here,
she thought.
I’d never hear the last of this. Carpenters sleep while the sorceress trembles.

Meralda’s footfalls came faster and harder until the hall simply ended, and the shaft of light from her magelamp soared up and out, only to lose itself in the vast, cavernous maw of the Tower.

Kervis whistled softly.

“Bats,” said Tervis, his face turned upward. “You’d think there would be bats.”

“Not a one,” said Meralda. “There isn’t a crack or a gap anywhere in the Tower. It’s an amazing structure.” She played the lamplight out into the darkness, resting the beam finally on the far side of the Tower and the faint outline of the winding, rail-less stair that wound lazily up and away into the dark.

“We climb that?” asked Kervis.

Meralda nodded. “It’s wider than it looks,” she said, though she understood the badly-hidden wash of fear in the boy’s voice. She recalled the first time she had ascended the stair. Darkness above, and darkness below, a magelit patch of old black stone to her left, a hungry void a step to her right.

From the idling carpenters just beyond the doors, Meralda heard the barest snatch of soft, low laughter.

There will be no more bloody shivering,
she said, to herself.
I won’t have it.

“Do either of you have a fear of high places?”

In perfect unison, both Bellringers, their faces pale in the magelamp, wiped sweat from their foreheads with their right hands, set their jaws, and shook their heads.

“We’re not afraid,” said Kervis. “Shall I go first?”

Meralda waved him ahead. “Stay in the lamplight,” she said. “Tervis, if you would be so good as to follow?”

“Right behind you, ma’am.”

Meralda switched her bag to her right shoulder and set out for the foot of the stair. She knew it was her imagination, but laughter seemed to follow all the way up to the Wizard’s Flat.

“At last.”

The stair ended at a narrow wooden door. Kervis halted and reached out for the tarnished brass knob, but pulled his hand back before he touched it. “Ma’am,” he said, panting and looking back over his shoulder at Meralda. “Is this it?”

Meralda brushed back a damp lock of red hair and nodded. “Yes,” she said. “The Wizard’s Flat.”

Kervis flashed a crooked grin and sank into a winded slouch against the Tower wall. Boots scraped softly on stone behind her, and Meralda turned to face Tervis, who had been silent the whole of the long climb to the flat.

Both boys were streaked with sweat. Their stiff red and black palace guard uniforms looked thick enough for the dead of winter, but Tervis was pasty-faced and wild-eyed, as well as sweaty. Meralda watched as the boy inched his way, with elaborate care, up onto the last tread between them.

“Tervis?” she said, softly. “We’re here. It’s almost over.”

Tervis met her eyes and gulped.

“He’s just winded,” said Kervis, quickly. “A few moments on a good solid floor and he’ll be right up, ma’am,” he added. “Isn’t that right, little brother?”

Tervis tried to speak, but only croaked. While he licked his lips Meralda reached into her pocket and found the key that opened the flat. “We could all use a place to sit,” she said. “The door is locked, Kervis.” She thrust the key into the cone of light from her magelamp. “Take this and open the door, if you will.”

Kervis took the key. “What about, um, spells?” he said.

Meralda shook her head. “No spells here,” she replied. “It’s just a key, and that’s just a lock.” She eyed Tervis, whose complexion was looking decidedly more greenish by the moment. “If you please?”

Kervis thrust the key into the lock and turned it.

The lock made a single loud click.

Kervis withdrew the key and handed it back to Meralda. “In we go,” he said, turning the latch and pushing.

The door held fast. Kervis pushed harder.

“Open it,” said Tervis, though clenched teeth.

Kervis turned the latch again, pushed. “What am I doing wrong?” he said. “It turns, but it won’t open.”