All the Paths of Shadow

by Frank Tuttle

  The three legendary Tables of the King, each made of polished cherry wood and capable of seating four hundred, were ringed round on three sides with chairs and guests. The tables were arrayed in a line before the throne, which rested on a knee-high dais at the far end of the Gold Room. A trio of Red Guards stood frozen at attention before the throne. The guards would not stand down until Yvin and his queen ascended the dais and bade them depart.

  The Throne of Tirlin, Meralda knew, started out as a large oak chair. Just a chair, nothing more. At first.

  Then King Pollof had added cushions and a bit of carving on the arms. Then King Lertinor had decided gold-worked dragons’ heads looked imposing as a headrest, and King Adoft had added the clawed silver feet, and at some point it became customary for every king to add his own personal touch to what bore less and less resemblance to a seat of any kind, ceremonial or otherwise.

  Meralda had once heard Yvin threaten to haul the throne off to a museum and have a reclining Phendelit reading chair brought in. In fact, Meralda could see the corner of a threadbare red seat cushion peeking out from behind the throne’s clawed feet. And was that a dog-eared Alon mystery novel, wedged down between the arm and the seat?

  Above the throne and the milling court, sunlight streamed in pastel shafts through the stained glass windows set high along the Gold Room’s curving cathedral ceilings. The gently moving air, an innovation of Meralda’s, smelled of cinnamon and faint perfumes, all circulated by dozens of quiet spark coil fans hidden behind screens below the windows.

  The north wall windows were Meralda’s favorite. Each depicted Tim the Horsehead’s exploits against the Vonat wizard Corrus, and Tim’s narrow triumph at the Battle of Romare. I’m surprised Yvin didn’t have masks glued over them, thought Meralda. But then, even Yvin isn’t terribly worried about offending a handful of Vonats.

  Someone shouted, and the minstrels began to pipe and strum and arrange their music. Meralda smiled at the gentle sound of Phendelit harps and Tirlish violins and settled back. At least there’ll be a bit of music, she thought. It’s been months since I’ve been to the symphony.

  The third trumpet blew. Meralda groaned and rose, with the rest of the court, resigned to remain standing until Yvin arrived and was seated.

  Meralda gazed about a bit, searching for familiar faces. The king’s tables, reserved for visiting Eryans and highly-placed Tirls, were full of strangers. But among those seated with her in the ranks of chairs behind the tables, Meralda found a few of her former professors from the college, a handful of familiar newspaper penswifts, the conductor of the Tirlin Philharmonic, and, of course, Sir Ricard Asp, who met her gaze with a barely concealed sneer.

  A sudden mad scramble for chairs began. Conversation continued, though in hushed tones, and something in the frowns and the earnest gazes and the shaking heads nearby made Meralda wonder what she’d missed.

  It isn’t good news, she decided, as she caught a glimpse of the captain lost in whispered debate with a pair of frowning Red Guard lieutenants. Not good news at all.

  A hand fell light upon her shoulder. “Aye, lass,” spoke a man, his words buried in a familiar full tilt Eryan highland brogue. “It’s time you took a husband, and it’s time I took a wife. What do ye say, now? Shall we hire a piper and a hall?”

  Meralda’s breath caught in her throat. “Alas,” she said, determined to keep her voice calm and level. “I vowed not to marry beneath myself, even for pity’s sake. Surely you understand.”

  Before the man could answer, the brass-bound doors at the end of the Gold Room were flung open and King Yvin marched inside, Queen Pellabine on his arm.

  The musicians struck up “Tirlin, Tirlin,” the assembled court fell silent, and Meralda turned, smiling down at the fat, grey-headed Eryan standing behind her.

  “Just as well,” said the older man, his eyes merry, his mouth cocked in a crooked smile. “Everyone knows Tirlish women can’t cook.” The Eryan bowed deeply, winking at the shocked glares of those nearby.

  Meralda shoved her chair aside and caught the old man up in a long, fierce hug.

  Shingvere of Wing, Mage to the Realm of Erya, patted Meralda on the back, then gently pushed her away. “Not in front of the old folks,” he said, cheerily. “That can only lead to a lot of loose talk.”

  Meralda squeezed his hand, and the rotund Eryan squeezed back. “Do you know who I am?” he asked the gape-jawed Tirlish noble standing to Meralda’s right.

  The man stared and choked back a reply.

  “Good,” said Shingvere. “That’s a nice chair you’ve got. I think I’ll take it. Find another, won’t you?”

  Then he patted the man’s shoulder, winked at Meralda, and sat.

  The noble scurried away, peering back over his shoulder as if memorizing Shingvere’s face and clothes for the guard.

  “I’ve missed you,” said Meralda, as the last strains of “Tirlin, Tirlin” began to fade. I truly have, she realized, surprised at the intensity of her emotion. The old wizard had never once treated her as a child, even when she’d first arrived at college. “I’d heard you were ill, and not planning to attend.”

  Shingvere smiled, but the music died and he did not speak.

  Yvin stepped onto the dais and escorted Queen Pellabine to her own smaller but more comfortable throne, and the two were seated.

  The rest of the court sat then, with a sound like lazy thunder.

  “Lots of long faces,” whispered Shingvere, as Yvin began to welcome the Eryans. “And I don’t wonder. Have you heard the news?”

  Meralda shook her head.

  Shingvere grinned. “It’s the Hang,” he said. “They’re here, sailing up the Lamp. Twenty of those Great Sea five-mast rigs. One of them is flying the Long Dragon flag.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “I am not,” said Shingvere. “The Hang are coming, all the way from the other side of the world. Chaos and discord abound.” The fat wizard fumbled in his pockets and withdrew a sticky white stick of candy wrapped in a shiny red paper wrapper.

  “Penny-stick?” he said.

  “Penny-stick?”

  “Stop pestering her with those atrocious jaw-breakers,” said Thaumaturge Fromarch. “She’s here to learn history, not bad eating habits.”

  Meralda—then Apprentice Ovis, barely out of the college, less than a year into her apprenticeship to Thaumaturge Fromarch—kept her eyes firmly fixed on page four hundred of Trout and Windig’s A History of Tirlin and Erya and Environs, With Generous Illustration Throughout. She’d read the same passage a half-dozen times, and still could make no sense of it. No wonder, when all the mages did was bluster and argue.

  “Bah,” said Mage Shingvere, the round little Eryan. “You’re wasting her time with that revisionist Tirlish history, Fromarch, and you know it. Look at this.” Shingvere spun Meralda’s book around, so he could read from it. “It says here that ‘the Hang first appeared in the spring of 1072, and they’ve visited the Realms once a century since then’.”

  Fromarch sighed. “Hang visits have been well documented, even from the earliest days of the Old Kingdom.”

  “Bah!” said Shingvere, spinning the book back around to Meralda. “The Hang have been sneaking around since well before ten hundred, and they’ve bloody well been back more than once a century, and you’re an idiot not to see it.” Shingvere shook his finger at Meralda. “You’re a smart one, lass, so you listen to old Shingvere. Read what’s in your books. But don’t ever forget that printing a thing doesn’t make it true.”

  Mage Fromarch groaned and rubbed his forehead. “Spare us.”

  “The Hang have been watching us for more than a millennium,” said Shingvere, quietly. “Ask any Eryan beach comber. Ask any Phendelit fisherman. I’ve got a scrap of paper with Hang scribbles on it in my study. Are you going to tell me it floated from Hang to Erya?” The Eryan snorted. “They’re out there, closer than you think,” he said. “And one day, miss, they’re going to come sailing up the Lamp to
stay. Mark my words, both of you. The Vonats may rattle their swords every twenty years or so, but the Hang are the real threat, Great Sea or not.”

  Mage Fromarch stood. “Apprentice Ovis,” he said, to Meralda. “Our Eryan associate’s outlandish ideas aside, we have a history lesson to discuss. Now then. How did the advent of the airship shape New Kingdom politics in the years before the Parting?”

  Meralda shook her head. The answer to Mage Fromarch’s question was obvious enough. But there, on the page, was a hand-drawn picture of a Hang warship, a ship that had done what no vessel of the Realms had ever done. It had crossed the Great Sea, and would do so again.

  “They’re up to no good,” said Shingvere, softly. “Mark my words, Apprentice Ovis. No bloody good.”

  Meralda closed the book, but the crude drawing of the Hang five-master haunted her dreams for days.

  Chapter Three

  Meralda took Shingvere’s penny-stick and, just as she had countless times as an apprentice, slipped it wordlessly in her pocket.

  Yvin’s voice faded to a drone. Unhearing, Meralda dreamily recalled the little towns and villages strewn haphazardly along the banks of the Lamp, and wondered what sort of bedlam was occurring as the towering masts of the Great Sea ships bore down upon the fisher folk.

  Meralda shivered. The Hang. Sailing up the Lamp at last. If, of course, that Eryan rascal beside me is to be believed.

  As if he’d heard, Shingvere caught Meralda’s eye and nodded gravely, every hint of humor gone from his face.

  Meralda sighed. It’s true, then. For the first time in forty-five years the Hang have crossed the Great Sea, bound for Tirlin, practically on the eve of the Accords. No coincidence, that.

  “He won’t say a word, today,” whispered Shingvere, with a nod toward King Yvin. “We’ll all pretend it’s a secret, till the papers get wind of it. After that, Thaumaturge, if I were you I’d consider exercising that legendary distance mages and thaumaturges have for courts.”

  “Would that I could,” whispered Meralda.

  Shingvere grinned. “And I’d tell old windbag there to leave the Tower’s shadow be.”

  Heads turned toward the Eryan. “Shhhh,” hissed a Tirlish courtier.

  Shingvere made a gesture, and the man’s hair stood suddenly on end.

  “Shingvere!” said Meralda, as the wide-eyed courtier lifted his hands to his head.

  Shingvere glared, and the man’s hair fell. “Mind your manners,” grumbled the Eryan.

  Applause broke out as King Yvin bade the Eryan court to rise and be made welcome.

  Shingvere rolled his eyes and remained seated. “I’m meeting Fromarch this evening,” he whispered, as the applause died. “You’ll come too, won’t you? I’m sure the doddering old skinflint will have a supper meal of some poor sort.”

  Meralda nodded.

  Shingvere grinned. “Good. You’re old enough to have a pint with us now, you know. Never drank with a Tirlish woman before. Might be fun.”

  Again, applause rang out. Meralda caught sight of the captain’s back as he slipped through the furthest west doors. Soon, three of the captain’s staff and a handful of black-clad Secret Service officers followed.

  Yvin’s welcome speech droned on. Within moments, Shingvere was snoring.

  Meralda settled into her chair, gazed up at the stained glass murals and Tim the Horsehead’s toothy equine grin, and wondered just how he would have reacted to a fleet of Long Dragon five-masters sailing up the Lamp.

  “Pardon, ma’am,” said Kervis, “But what’s a Long Dragon five-master?”

  Their waiter hovered near, fussing with napkins and forks on a recently cleared table while he eavesdropped. Meralda brought her finger to her lips, and Kervis nodded and fell silent.

  Orlo’s sidewalk café was bustling. Diners were being seated on the knee-high walls of Orlo’s sputtering three-tiered fountain, on the backs of parked cabs, on upturned milk buckets, and, in one instance, on a wrought-iron trolley-stop bench hauled away from the curb by a bevy of brawny Builder’s Guild bricklayers. Waiters ducked and bobbed, arms laden with plates and drinks, their movements more dance than stride.

  A trio of skinny black-clad bankers darted like crows for the empty table beside Meralda’s. The waiter bade the newcomers welcome, promised them tea, and then, with a backward glance toward Meralda, he darted away.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” said Kervis.

  “No matter,” said Meralda. “It’ll all be in the papers tomorrow anyway.”

  Meralda swallowed the last bite of her ham on rye and washed it down with ice-cold Phendelit day tea.

  “A five-master,” she said, wiping her chin, “is a ship. A Great Sea ship, half as long as the Tower is tall. The Long Dragon is the flag of the Chentze, which is the Hang equivalent of the house of a king.”

  The Bellringers simultaneously lifted their right eyebrows.

  “Big ship,” said Kervis.

  Meralda took another long draught of her day tea. “They cross the Great Sea,” she said. “I suppose they have to be.”

  Tervis frowned. “No one but the Hang has ever crossed the Great Sea,” he said. “Is that right?”

  “It is,” said Meralda. “Eryans, Phendelits, us, the Vonats. Everyone has tried. But the ships either turn back, or vanish.” Meralda put down her glass. “Current thinking holds that the sea extends at least twenty thousand miles from every coast,” she said.

  “Fly it,” said Kervis, matter-of-factly. “Why not send an airship?”

  “It’s been tried,” said Meralda. “The ones that made it back all told the same story. No land past the Islands. Not a speck. Just sea and storms and it goes on forever,” she said. “That’s a quote, from the master of the airship Yoreland. They were aloft for more than two months.”

  Tervis whistled. “Two months?”

  Meralda nodded. “No one has tried since,” she said. “At least, no one of the Realms.”

  Tervis shook his head. “These Hang,” he said, after a furtive look around. “What do they want?”

  Meralda wiped her hands on her napkin. “People have been asking that for nine hundred years, Tervis,” she said. “I wish I knew.”

  The palace bells struck twice. Meralda covered her plate with her napkin, and after a moment, Kervis and Tervis did the same. Meralda smiled.

  “Well, gentlemen,” she said, as their red-haired Phendelit waiter appeared. “Time to go.” She dropped a small silver coin into the waiter’s hand and grinned into his astonished face. “A Hang fleet is heading for Tirlin,” she whispered, as the man blushed furiously. “Fifty ships, each longer than five Towers and each laden with forty thousand four-armed, two-headed, venom-spitting half-wolf Hang warriors. When you tell the penswifts, do try to get the numbers right.”

  Kervis raced around to Meralda’s side of the table and pulled her chair back. “You probably shouldn’t mention the war dragons or the marching ogres, ma’am,” he said. “Might cause a panic.”

  Meralda nodded solemn agreement, turned, and bade the Bellringers to follow. The Phendelit waiter watched for a moment, shook his head, and darted off to refill another round of tea glasses.

  The Thaumaturgical Library buried deep within the palace cellars held little in the way of research concerning directed refraction. Instead, Meralda found page after page of intricate, improbable spellworks intended to render mages and kings invisible.

  “Nonsense,” she muttered, skimming past the last ten pages of an entry listed as “Mage Mellick’s Wondrous Optical Void.” Frowning, she decided the only thing this Mellick ever made vanish was a monthly portion of the crown’s purse.

  Disgusted, she rose, closed the heavy wood-bound volume, and padded barefoot on the cool stone floor back toward the library stacks. The foxfire she’d cast followed her, maintaining its station just above her left shoulder, sending shadows darting and bobbing down the long, high ranks of books arcane.

  Boot steps sounded down the corridor outside the library, c
ausing Meralda to frown until the footfalls turned and ended with the slamming of a door. She’d practically had to threaten the Bellringers to make them stay out of the library. The last thing she wanted now was an apprentice wizard from the college pestering her with sidelong looks and first-year questions.

  Meralda shoved the heavy tome back into its place and stepped back. “Oh, for an index,” she muttered. “Four thousand eight hundred volumes reaching back six hundred years and not a table of contents in the lot.”

  The library replied with silence and darkness. Meralda sighed, closed her eyes, and plucked another name from her memory. “Mage Heldin,” she said aloud. “Thaumaturge to King Roark II. Originator of Heldin’s Suspended Mirror. 1740, I think.” Meralda stalked down the stacks, squinting at the dates embossed on the spine of each book.

  Tirlin’s history fled past. Meralda wondered what was hidden there, within the brittle pages. Oh, rubbish, for the most part, she mused, but no doubt a few gems as well.

  “Perhaps even a shadow moving spell,” she said aloud. “Or am I the first to try?”

  Heldin. Meralda slowed, urged the foxfire brighter. 1738, 1739—1740. “Here you are,” she said, pulling the book gently out of the chest-high shelf and brushing away the worst of the dust and spider webs. “Let’s see if you were worth looking for.”

  Pages crackled as they turned. Page One contained a faded but still legible List of Works, With Page Numbers. Meralda smiled and began to read, ticking off spells as she went. “Spinning Colored Lights” held little interest, as it was merely a simple variation of the foxfire charm that hung above her shoulder. But what was “Seeing in Circles”?

  Meralda turned fragile pages and returned to her desk. Part of her mind wrestled with Mage Heldin’s abysmal penmanship, but the rest was occupied with Hang five-masters.