All the Paths of Shadow (46 page)

“I understand the situation, mistress. I do. But to reply to a question with a question, what better time than now to, um, explore exciting new friendships, shall we say?”

“Any time would be better than now, if I wanted such a thing.”

“Which you clearly don’t.”

“Of course I don’t. He is a Hang noble of some sort. Or a spy. Or both.”

“When he isn’t cooking you elaborate meals, that is.”

“I haven’t asked for a single scrap, Mug, and you know that!”

A knock sounded at the door. Kervis stuck his head inside and peeked about.

“I’ve got a fresh pot of coffee,” he said. “And some pastries.”

“Bring them in,” said Meralda, with a final glare at Mug. “I’ll be working all night.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the Bellringer. He brought a carafe of coffee and a plate full of donuts inside and placed them carefully on a workbench.

“Anything else, ma’am?”

“No,” said Meralda, suddenly weary. “Thank you. That was very thoughtful.”

Kervis nodded and darted back through the doors.

Mug turned his eyes back toward the glass and began to hum. Meralda poured a cup of coffee and returned to her calculations, pretending she didn’t recognize the old Phendelit wedding march Mug sang.

Twenty-two. He looks a bit older,
mused Meralda, instantly chiding herself for doing so.
What difference does it make to me, whether Donchen is twenty-two or sixty-two? If we survive the Accords he’ll soon be boarding that monstrous ship of his and sailing away forever, anyway. Even the Hang can’t cross the Great Sea on a whim.

“Seven times five is most certainly not sixty,” said Mug. He pointed with a vine toward Meralda’s latest scribble. “Someone’s mind is wandering.”

Meralda crossed out the error and resumed her calculations without a word. Mug regarded her with a pair of sad blue eyes for a moment, before turning his attention back to the mirror, and its slow deliberate sweeps of the halls and corridors near the laboratory.

“Are you sure this is necessary? It’s nearly midnight, mistress.”

Meralda shook her head. “I know the time, Mug. What of it?”

“The Tower. At midnight. Hello? Haunted tower, dead of night? You don’t see a potential for mischief anywhere in that description?”

“I can assure you my volume is free of any phantasmal presences,” said Tower. Meralda thought she heard a hint of amusement in Tower’s careful tone. “At midnight, or any other hour.”

“Well, you wouldn’t bloody know if you were haunted, now would you? That’s how ghosts work. Showing up where you know they can’t possibly be.”

“So the presence of a ghost is confirmed by the absence of a ghost?”

Meralda raised her hand for silence. “I’m going, Mug. Tower will be with me. So will Nameless and Faceless. I can’t save the kingdom on banker’s hours.”

“I still don’t trust you-know-who and you-know-what,” whispered Mug.

“I know.” Meralda rose, picked up her equipment bag, and moved to her workbench, where she began sorting the instruments strewn atop it and filling her bag.
Holdstones, wire mesh field director, spare latching wands, a dagger in my boot. I might as well wear a helm and carry a sword, too. Maybe then Mug would stop tossing his leaves at me.

Midnight, in the Tower.
Meralda shivered and pushed the thought aside.
Tower is hardly an ancient spectre of evil. And I am hardly a fainting penny-novel maiden, ready to swoon at the first sight of an errant shadow or sound of far-off laughter.

“That should suffice.” Meralda looped the bag strap over her shoulder and faced Mug and the mirror. “Nameless, Faceless. To me, if you please.”

The staves appeared in her hands.

“Be careful, mistress.”

Before Meralda could reply, she was whisked away into the flat.

Mug watched as Meralda’s form blurred for an instant before simply vanishing. Even with his fastest eyes, he could see nothing of her actual passage through Goboy’s fragile old glass.

“I’m never going to get used to that,” he muttered.

Then he sought out Meralda’s shadowy form in the darkness of the flat.

Meralda worked in the dark, using only her Sight and her touch to carefully weave her own tether spells among the turnings of the damaged originals.

Tower murmured to her, now and then, his soft words relayed by Mug through the speaking device.

The first new tether took root in Tower’s central shaft, and then spiraled out, wrapping the old tether as it went, and stopping just short of attaching itself to the cursework whirling through the night.

“Done,” said Meralda.

“I shall count,” said Tower, through Mug. “One. Two. Three…”

Thirty seconds passed.

The tether held.

Meralda let out her breath.

“Mistress,” said Mug, his tone hushed. “It worked.”

Meralda sank to her knees for a moment. Her heart pounded, and her head felt light, and for an instant she nearly lost her Sight.

This may work after all,
she thought.
I didn’t truly believe it would.

Tower spoke. “I am prepared to proceed with the remaining structures when you are ready, Mage. Well done.”

Meralda rose. “My feet are killing me,” she said.

Mug laughed. “Words for the ages, mistress. You take all the time you need.”

Meralda stretched, yawned, and straightened. “Let’s get this done.” Then she extended her Sight, and began latching the second tether to Tower’s central spellwork.

One by one, the tethers latched, coiled, and spun. Tower reported no wobbling or changes in speed. Meralda sent Nameless and Faceless out into the night, pushing her Sight through them, watching the circling curseworks for any sign of trouble, and seeing none.

The new tethers glowed bright amid Tower’s ancient spells. Meralda loosed the final portion of her spell upon them, concealing them from any Sight other than her own, and one by one they dimmed and appeared to vanish.

From far down the Tower, there came the sound of tramping boots upon the stair.

Meralda froze. The sound stopped.

Perhaps I’m imagining things,
she thought.
I’m exhausted.

A cough echoed up through the dark.

Meralda closed her hand tight about the speaking device and brought her finger to her lips.

“Mistress, what is it?” whispered Mug.

Meralda pointed down, and then she released the brass shaft that activated the speaking device.

The unmistakable sound of boots scraping on the stair resumed.

I can’t have Mug shouting about ghosts when he hears that,
she thought.

“Staves,” she mouthed, silently. “To me.”

Nameless and Faceless fell silently into her hands.

Meralda moved to the open door, keeping to the edge of it. The night was moonless and dark, but stray city lights through the windows in the flat might still show her outline to anyone on the stair, if they were looking up.

Meralda listened.

Someone was in the Tower. Someone was on the stair, still far below, but climbing.

Meralda knew the park was under full night guard, and the Tower doors were locked and warded and ringed with a dozen hawk-eyed Special Duty soldiers who were, themselves, being watched by another two dozen palace regulars. And probably Fromarch and Shingvere and whatever odd magics they had aimed at the place.

But the boots scraped and the man coughed again and Meralda even saw a faint blob of yellow-gold light begin to bob on the stair, far below.

“One comes
,
”
said Nameless from her right hand.

“He is hidden by strange magics,”
said Faceless from her left.

“Is he known to you?”

“Humindorus Nam.”

“Shall we strike him down?”

Images formed in Meralda’s mind’s eye.

She saw the staves swooping down, saw them striking at the Vonat like hawks. Saw him scream and flail and fall, shrieking, shrieking, gone.

She saw how she could remove his spells even as he fell. Saw how she could take them into her, make them hers, make them far more powerful than the Vonat ever imagined they could become.

“You could defeat him that easily?”

“Who can say?”

“Shall we try?”

The single word ‘yes’ formed on Meralda’s lips. Such an easy word to say. And why not say it? The man sought out the destruction of Tirlin.
He is obviously here to ready his deadly electrical spell, so the commencement speech will see the death of hundreds.

And he tried to kill me, just days ago.

Why not say yes?

So easy to say yes.

She felt a peculiar expectant silence from the staves.

What would Tam have done?

“You know your master’s likeness,” mouthed Meralda, to the staves.

“Indeed,”
they chorused.

“Clothe me in it. His likeness. His voice. The aspect of his magics. Can you do that?”

“It is done,”
said Nameless.
“Behold.”

The air before Meralda became a brief mirror, and in it stood Otrinvion the Black.

He was indeed tall, as the legends said. Tall and scarred and black-haired and dark-eyed. His beard covered many of the scars on his face, but not all. The hands that gripped the staves were huge, strong, covered in sigils and runes which moved and changed shape.

Meralda looked away, lest those eyes peer right into the secret places in her soul.

“It has been long since we beheld him,”
said Nameless.

“May he rest in peace,
” said Faceless.

The mirror vanished.

“Maintain this appearance,” said Meralda. She took a deep breath. “His voice, too.”

Meralda took to the stair, stepping quietly until Nameless showed her a way to silence her own movements. After that, she walked quickly, watching the Vonat’s tiny light weave and wobble its way up toward her.

Meralda stopped.

Humindorus Nam stopped as well. His light flared suddenly brighter. The sound of harsh Vonat words, spoken in a chant, echoed up the Tower’s empty expanse.

“Now?”
asked Nameless.

“Now,” said Meralda.

Her awareness merged with that of the staves.

Light,
she thought, and light there was, blazing from both staves, flooding the midnight dark of the Tower with the sudden harsh light of day.

A hundred feet down the stair, the Vonat whirled, dropping his tools, gasping at the sudden blaze of light.

Meralda caught a single brief glimpse of the man’s wild eyes and open mouth before he lifted his own staff and hurled a gout of fire directly at her.

Nameless showed Meralda a hidden space, and time slowed about it. The rushing gout of wild flame stopped, beautiful, a blooming crimson flower made of fire and heat and light.

Meralda flicked it into oblivion with ease.

The Vonat waved his staff, and the air was filled with knives. They flashed toward Meralda, a school of shiny razors, until she sent them hurtling back toward the Vonat with the merest flick of her hand.

The Vonat’s staff, a thing of moaning wet bones wrapped in iron, shielded its master with a cloak of ice. The ice broke when the knives struck, filling the Tower with the sound of tinkling and shattering, far below.

Meralda spoke through Otrinvion’s throat, her voice loud and strong and harsh.

“How dare you disturb my rest?” she said. Echoes rolled like thunder. “How dare you invade my home?”

The Vonat rose and shouted a word and surrounded Meralda with a clinging, choking cloud of thick, deadly smoke.

Meralda dispelled it with a glance. The Vonat sent a wave of serpents slithering up the stair, each hooded and hissing and dripping with venom. Meralda burned them to ash before any could strike.

A rain of acid hail, a burst of killing wind, a screaming voice that cried madness into the mind and despair into the heart. A second wave of fire. A mass of flying whips. A sudden rain of spears.

All came hurtling toward Meralda, and all fell before her newfound power.

So easy,
she thought, as each attack failed, as the staves showed her hidden things filled with power.

Why not strike him down?

Why not strike them all down?

The Vonat sent a final burst of hungry shadows at Meralda, and then sank to his knees, breathless and spent.

“Who are you, to trouble me?”

Meralda felt the words leave her throat, but was unsure for an instant who spoke them.

“Who are you, to dare my wrath?”

Who are you, to use my voice?

“Is this not what you wanted?”
asked a stave.

“Is it not power you sought?”
asked the other.

I could have it all,
thought Meralda.
Power in every shadow. No more struggling. No more doubt.

No more Meralda.

What was it Tam had said?

“There will come a time when you must choose,” Meralda remembered. “Choose between power and stealth. Between might and wisdom. Between the easy way, and the hard.”

Meralda took a deep breath.

“Behold, son of Vonath,” she said, in Otrinvion’s booming voice. “You would dare intrude, dare seek to ensorcel my home? Then see the price of thy impertinence. Look up, and see!”

Meralda reached forth and gripped Nam’s chin and forced his head up before imposing her Sight full upon his.

She showed him the curseworks, showed him the tethers. Showed him the moving, living mass of spells and magics that coursed through the Tower.

“Fire, Vonat.”

She showed him the curse of fire, how it would devour stone and iron, such was the ferocity of its burning.

“Wind.”

She showed him dark funnels of black wind that fell from a boiling sky before marching across the lands, ravaging everything in their path.

“Pestilence.”

She forced the Vonat to see each of the dozen curses.