The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way (7 page)

The walls were smooth. The towers had not been built from stone blocks. There were no seams, no mortar, no joins at all. The walls were as even and featureless as water in a still pool.

She went inside, noting that the door was made of the same smooth black stone, but it was as thin as a wafer. There was no furniture, no broken crockery, or evidence of a fireplace. Ivy and Kinz stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs, but they no longer seemed keen on exploring. Cazia had to move closer to them to see why: while the ceiling in the room was twelve feet from the floor, the stairs were practically a tunnel. The space was no higher than Cazia’s belly button.
 

“Little people?” Ivy said, but Cazia had no idea what she meant. She knelt to look up the stairs. It was pitch dark.
 

Cazia walked a circuit of the room. There were no other doors, only shutterless windows. A black stone core supported the tower the way a center pole held up a round tent, but there were no doors in that, either. The choice was simple: leave, stay huddled in this insecure room, or crawl up the stairs.
 

How did we get to this madness? Grunts rampage on the far side of the mountains while we satisfy our curiosity.
Still, Cazia had to admit that she was curious, too.

Cazia took a little gray stone from just beyond the door. Her magic had not fully returned, but she had enough for a small spell. She rubbed the mossy stone clean and cast a light spell on it. After so long, casting one of the Gifts felt like going home, like she was studying to be a scholar again. For a moment, as she held up the little glowing stone, she remembered the Scholars’ Tower, the map room, Doctor Twofin, and all the other parts of her life that were now lost.
 

She smiled anyway. Whatever she had lost, she still had this.
 

Then she glanced at her companions and saw Ivy’s furrowed brow and Kinz’s stony, hostile expression. Fire and Fury, they hated her
and
her magic.
 

Cazia wished she could think of something to say to the little princess to reassure her, but she couldn’t, not while the older girl was standing right there.
She swore to be our servant, but she lied.
Cazia wasn’t sure why that mattered so much, but it did. All three of them had lied during their time together—and Ivy’s plan to turn Cazia over to an Indregai military commander had been the most serious.
 

So, why did it bother Cazia so much that Kinz had been their servant and then, quite suddenly, stopped? Now she wanted to be treated as an equal—a companion—and that bothered Cazia for reasons she couldn’t articulate at the moment, but she was sure they were solid, good, excellent reasons.
 

Kinz wanted to lead the way up the stairs, but Cazia pushed by her and climbed on her hands and knees. The stone steps were painful, but not as bad as the rough passage she’d dug up the Northern Barrier. “Be careful,” Ivy whispered from close behind. They were following her through yet another tunnel.
 

The stair-tunnel curved around the stony core of the tower. Cazia felt goose bumps run down the length of her body. Anything could be up ahead. Ivy’s little people, armed with little spears and little bronze knives, might charge at them, screaming. A grass lion might have made a den on the top floor. A sudden flood of water might wash them all the way into the ocean.
 

She shut her eyes and did her best to clear her thoughts. It occurred to her that to be extremely brave, a person ought to have no imagination at all.
 

Nothing attacked them on the stair except for a horrifying stench that grew thicker as they approached the top. Cazia reached the second floor after approximately one half circuit of the tower. It resembled the first: the only light came from narrow, unshuttered windows and the floor was bare smooth stone without a stick of furniture.
 

There were other differences beside the smell. Rows of cubbyholes had been built into one of the walls. At one spot, the stone wall protruded to form a bowl. At another, there was a wide, flat stone shelf--almost as large as a bed—with a white stone lever above it. As best Cazia could see, the lever did not do anything; it was a length of stone bent midway at a right angle
as though it had been carved from the corner of a block
, nothing more. The lower end of the lever was oddly shaped, like an oversized setting for a now-missing jewel.

Then they found a depression in the stone floor full of putrid water. It might have been a bathing tub at some point, but the water was covered with a noxious scum with nasty gray and green lumps floating in it.
 

Ivy waved her hand in front of her nose. “Oh, that is revolting! How long has this stood here?”

“Too long,” Kinz said. “Let us make to move on quickly.”
 

Cazia set the glowing stone into a cubby nearby and began to move her hands, beginning the preparations for the Fifth Gift. She heard Ivy call her name, but ignored her. All her concentration was focused on the filthy water below.
 

Having gone hollow and been cured of it, Cazia had a new, deeper understanding of the way her thoughts and motions controlled the Gifts. It was a new level of knowledge and power, but she had not yet been given the chance to truly explore it.
 

The Fifth Gift was one of the first she’d been taught. She’d been casting it since she was nine years old, but today, it was an incredible strain. Creating lightstones was easy--had always been easy, although the one she’d just made barely glowed at all.
 
Other Gifts were not so simple.
 

Calling up her magic for this spell was like trying to inhale with a hand clamped over her mouth. She pushed outward, feeling the magic pass through the water like a net, purifying it.
 

But she didn’t have the strength to do the whole tub. With nearly two-thirds left undone, the thought structures in her mind collapsed and the noxious scum sloshed through the cleaned part of the tub, undoing her work.
 

“I’m not ready yet,” she said. “I just need a little more time.”
 

She didn’t have to look at the others to know what their expressions would be, but she did it anyway. Of course, they were unhappy to see her casting spells again, but really, what did they expect?

Ivy found and pulled a small stone lever. The nasty water drained out through a tiny drain in the wall. Cazia went to the window beside it and saw the ocean churning below. It gave her a sick, prickly feeling, especially knowing they had just dumped garbage at the water’s edge like bait in a nonexistent trap.
 

Even with the water drained away, the tower room still smelled so horribly, it made her want to retch. At least she wasn’t hungry any more.

“Big sister,” Ivy began warily, “maybe it would be best if there was no more magic. At least, not unless we all agree it is truly necessary.”
 

Despite herself, Cazia was surprised. “You expect me to ask permission? Am I the servant now, little sister?”
 

That seemed to surprise Ivy. Cazia turned away from them to avoid saying anything that might infuriate them, and noticed another low entrance. She approached it and held up the lightstone. It wasn’t a stair this time but a corridor. Who would build a structure where the rooms were high enough to stand in but everyone had to drop to their hands and knees to move between them?
 

Cazia began to crawl. The others followed her, and this time, there were no frightening flights of imagination. This time, her thoughts were consumed by what she would say if Kinz and Ivy demanded a veto over her spellcasting.
 

The idea of it soured her. She needed them if she was going to get back over the mountains--and they needed her even more--but how were they going to make it if they didn’t trust each other?
 

The corridor opened into another round room of black stone. This one did not have the massive circular core at the center, but it did have another flight of tunnel-stairs leading down. Along the walls were another series of flat, broad shelves, none higher off the ground than knee height. They had been arranged in groups of three or four with open spaces between.
 

“What do you think?” Ivy said. Her voice sounded strained. “Are they beds for families to sleep together or couches for elders to discuss the plans?”
 

Ivy sat on one and Cazia sat across from her. Her hiking skirts were still damp from the river and the cold stone chilled her. “More like punishment.”
 

Cazia began to string together the thoughts that would let her cast the Eleventh Gift but she did not move her hands. The spell would never work without gestures, but the stone began to reveal itself to her in a way she didn’t quite understand, as though she could feel the inside and outside of it without touching. The beds were hollow. Very sturdy, but hollow.
 

“Ooo!” Ivy said, pointing.
 

There was a row of cubbies along the floor behind Cazia, but these were not empty. Cazia rushed toward them.

The nearest held a jumble of odd wooden tools: charred, slender skewers, fat wedges, and twisted things that might have been scrapers of some kind. Backscratchers? It didn’t matter. Cazia tossed them aside.
 

The cubby beside it held a small stack of mud-colored cloths folded into odd, five-sided stacks. Shaking one out, Cazia found it was circular and only a little musty.
 

In the next, she found something astonishing. It was a finely-wrought semicircle of intricate ironwork. Kinz gasped when she saw it, and Cazia spun around. Kinz had her hand on Ivy’s elbow, holding her back so Cazia could search the cubbies alone. Were they expecting her to disturb a snake or something? Cazia felt a sudden tingle of nervousness. Whatever danger they were expecting, they were letting her face it alone.
 

Cazia tossed the iron circlet to Kinz. “Take it. If we ever get out of here, we’re going to be going to Indrega, right? That ought to pay for a meal or two.”

Kinz blinked at it, her hand absent-mindedly rubbing at a spot of rust. Now that she didn’t have a hand on her arm, Ivy rushed forward to join Cazia on the floor.
 

Cazia didn’t want to look at either of them. Was Kinz trying to freeze her out and win the princess over? Probably not. She was almost certainly trying to protect the girl from Cazia. Hmf.
 

“Look at this!” Ivy pulled a small stack of square mats from one cubby. They were as long as Cazia’s hand, and had been dyed in six, no, seven colors. “Look at that blue.”

The little girl was right. Blue dye was precious and difficult to use, but this blue was as vibrant and even as the sky on a cloudless day.
 

All the mats had the same design, with minor differences: each had a yellow circle at the center, with six yellow rays shooting from it all the way to the edge of the cloth. In each of the wedges formed by those rays was a different design. One had a bird in a blue sky. Another showed black monoliths against a white background. Another looked like stormy water beneath a gray sky. Another showed a glowing mountain against a red sky. The last two were harder to recognize. A yellow forest, maybe? Brown desert beneath an orange sky?

“It’s the portal,” Cazia blurted suddenly. “The Door in the Mountain.”
 

“Do you think so?” Ivy answered. “It looks more like the sun.”
 

“Remember what Chik told us? He said his people came from a place where the soil, grass, and trees were orange. From another land.”

Ivy examined the design skeptically. “A red sky? An orange sky?”

Cazia held the mat close and examined the fibers. They were some kind of hair, but she couldn’t recognize it. “If they have different lands, they might have a sky different from ours.”

“It is possible,” Ivy said indulgently.
 

“Little sister, don’t condescend,” Cazia admonished, and the little girl blushed.
 

As Kinz came close to them, Cazia held up the mat in her hand like an empty platter. “Let me keep one of the Tilkilit stones. You can have the others, but I want one, just in case.”

Kinz made no argument but she clearly tried to think of one. She drew one of the smooth black stones from the pouch at her waist and dropped it onto the mat.
 

At the last moment, Cazia realized it was a mistake. The first time she’d had her magic stolen away, the stone had affected her through her skirts, and this strange mat offered her no better protection. She cried out and dropped it when Kinz placed it into the mat, but not fast enough. Her magic was gone again.

“Fire and Fury,” she spat. “Now I have to wait for my magic to come back again.”
 

Looking slightly relieved, Ivy held another iron circlet in her hand, but this one was meant for fighting. It was plain and sturdy, with two finger-long spikes protruding from the front. The ring, though, was very large. Cazia thought it might fit her thigh just above her knee, but who would make such a thing? And why?
 

Ivy passed the spiked ring to Kinz, who accepted it with a quiet “Thank you.” The older girl tried to find a way to wear it, but it wouldn’t go around her arm or her leg. The decorative circle rested on top of her head like a child’s crown.
 

Ivy cleared her throat. “Do you think the Tilkilit built this place?”
 

“No,” Cazia said immediately. She ran her hand over the smooth stone. “This place was made by magic, and the Tilkilit would have made more if they knew how, if only to protect themselves. Whoever did this is strong with magic. Plus, they built it by the sea, so they must have done it quickly.”
 

“But would that not affect them?” Kinz asked warily. “The way you were ‘hollowed out’?”