by Frank Tuttle
In nineteen days Tirlin will be crowded with the royal houses of all the Five Realms. The Phendelit king, The Alon queen, the regent of Vonath, the king of Erya. All together, all vulnerable. Meralda frowned.
Tirlin had burned, once. In 1660, Meralda recalled. Parts of the palace still bore the scars. Meralda had a vision of Fleethorse Street engulfed in flames, wondered why she should think such a thing, and was suddenly chilled to the bone.
Mage Heldin’s “Seeing in Circles” spell proved to be a crude method of momentarily freezing a hand-drawn image in a red-hot brass ring. Meralda sighed, stretched until her back and shoulders made popping noises, and put her chin down in her hands. Row after row of shadowed, dusty books stared back.
It appears, she said silently to herself, that I am on my own.
Someone knocked softly at the library door. “Ma’am,” said Kervis. “Five bells. You said to fetch you, and remind you about supper with the mages.”
Meralda closed Mage Heldin’s book and rose. “Coming, Guardsman,” she said, her voice sudden and loud in the stillness of the library. “Coming.”
She found her stockings, slipped them on, and pulled her boots on before returning the life work of one Mage Heldin, Thaumaturge to King Roark II, to its long vigil amid the dusty shelves.
Mage Fromarch, former Thaumaturge to the Kingdom of Tirlin, met Meralda on the porch of his tiny, ivy-covered red brick house.
Fromarch was gaunt. He’d been gaunt the day Meralda met him, five years before. His long, pale face with its wide-set grey eyes and hawkish nose and thin small mouth always looked tired, and perhaps a little sad. Meralda knew the last, at least, to be untrue. The real Fromarch, the one behind the long unsmiling face, always wore an impish grin.
Fromarch wore loose brown trousers and soft leather house shoes, the toes spotted with chemical burns and tiny spatters of molten metals. His white shirt bore a singe-mark in the center, the exact shape of an iron.
“Ho there, ’prentice,” he said, thrusting forth a bent ladle at Meralda before she mounted the last unswept porch step. “Taste this.”
Meralda took the spoon. Its bowl steamed, filled with a thick, meaty stew that smelled of onions, beef, and green bell peppers, though it was obviously far too hot to taste.
Meralda blew gently on the spoon and smiled. Fromarch didn’t smile back but his scowl did soften, and his wet grey eyes neither narrowed nor blazed when they met hers.
“Mage,” said Meralda. “I’ve missed you.”
“Hmmph.” snorted Fromarch. “You’ve got better sense than most, Mage Meralda. You taste this and tell certain upstart Eryan wand-wavers that we Tirlish folk know best how to season a bit of stew.”
Fromarch jerked his thumb behind him as he spoke, and Shingvere opened Fromarch’s screeching screen door far enough to poke his head outside.
“Good evening, Lady,” he said to Meralda. “Since the master of the house has no better manners than to accost guests on his porch with over salted stew, allow me to invite you inside. Mind the rotting carcasses, now, and don’t step into the trash pit.”
Meralda brought the spoon to her lips and tasted. “Well?” boomed Fromarch.
Meralda smiled. “It’s quite good,” she said. Fromarch whirled and snorted in triumph.
Shingvere flung the door open wide. “Now you’ve done it, Apprentice,” he said to Meralda, with a wink. “You’ve gone and agreed with him, and he’ll spend hours strutting and preening.” The aging wizard shook his head. “We can only hope he drinks to excess and lapses into quiet slumber before the evening is ruined.”
Meralda laughed, stepped onto the porch, and gently took Fromarch by the sleeve of his plain white shirt. “Come inside, both of you,” she said, handing Shingvere the stew spoon. “You know that elderly gentlemen are prone to crankiness if they miss their evening gruel.”
Shingvere crowed, and Fromarch nearly smiled, and from its burnished copper stand by the door Fromarch’s staff snickered audibly. “Quiet, you backscratcher,” said Fromarch.
Meralda stepped inside, took both wizards by their elbows, and marched them toward Fromarch’s kitchen.
After a long supper of summer stew and a thick butterscotch pudding prepared by Shingvere, Fromarch led his guests into his sitting room, opened all three windows, and bade everyone to sit and drink. An icebox of Nolbit’s Dark was dragged in from the pantry, and for the first time in her life Meralda drank ice-chilled Eryan ale and swapped gossip, mage to mage.
Talk began with the story of the Vonat spy caught red-handed and nearly frozen in the mail-hold of an Alon courier airship, a sheaf of coded papers sewn into his jacket. Shingvere then recounted the troubles facing the Alon queen and the blood feud between Clan Morar and Clan Glenoch. “Look close enough and you’ll see a Vonat in their midst,” said Shingvere. Fromarch merely snorted, observed airily that far too many Eryans spent far too much time seeing things that weren’t there, and changed the subject to talk of the near-completion of the railroad that would soon link Phendeli to Kendle.
“But here we are, two old gaffers doddering on about roads and boats when we ought to be talking about the lovely young lady in our midst,” said Shingvere, as he handed Meralda another bottle of Nolbit’s. “So tell us about the Tower, Mage Meralda,” he said. “Seen the haunt, have you?”
Meralda groaned. “Please,” she said. “Not that. Anything but that.”
Fromarch, from his shadowed repose in his enormous Phendelit reclining chair, guffawed. “Oh, he’s always believed in haunts and the like,” he said. “Can’t blame him, really, given the standards of education in dear old Erya.”
Shingvere ignored the jibe. “’Tis true I spent a whole summer chasing the Tower shade,” he said. “Back in—oh, 1967, it was. Did you know that?”
Meralda blinked. “I didn’t,” she said. No more Nolbit’s, she decided. Her legs and arms were getting heavy, while her head seemed light and wobbly.
She sank back into Fromarch’s couch, pulled a small copper funnel from behind the small of her back, and relaxed again.
“Nobody does,” said Fromarch, after a sip of beer and a sigh. “Too bloody embarrassing. If the Exchequer found out we’d spent from the crown’s purse on a spook hunt, we’d have been put out on our heads, and rightly so.”
Meralda frowned. “Were you a part of this, Mage?” she asked.
“Reluctantly,” Fromarch growled. “I was to make sure our Eryan friend didn’t mistake flying squirrels for long-dead wizards.” Fromarch leaned forward, so that his short ring of thin white hair and pale cheekbones shone faintly in the dim, slanting rays of the setting sun streaming lazily through the window.
“The ghost hunt, of course, was nonsense,” he began.
“Aye, but people were seeing lights in the Wizard’s Flat,” said Shingvere, quickly. “Reliable people. Guardsmen. Reporters. Even,” he said, after a pause and a grin, “a noted Tirlish Thaumaturge.”
Meralda shook her head to clear it. “You?” she asked Fromarch, incredulous. “You saw something?”
Fromarch snorted. “I saw lights in the Wizard’s Flat,” he said. “Once. Just lights, nothing more. Could have been kids with a lantern.”
Meralda thought about the long, long climb to the Wizard’s Flat, and the locked door at the top.
“These were clever, determined children,” said Shingvere. “Aye, one might even say brilliant, since the Tower, that evening, was locked, sealed with wards, and under heavy guard by no fewer than two dozen watchmen.” Shingvere assumed a pose of mock concentration. “In fact, I recall someone, I’m not sure who, making a grand proclamation early that very evening that no human being could possibly enter the Tower, that night. Who was that, I wonder?”
Fromarch emptied his bottle and put it down with a thump. “Lights at a window do not prove the existence of haunts,” he said. “Neither did you, I recall, despite a whole three months of fussing about with magnetometers and radial thaumeters and that bloody heavy wide-
band scrying mirror,” he added. “My back still aches, some days, from carrying that thing up and down those stairs while you pretended to fiddle with the holdstones.”
Shingvere held up his hand. “Aye. You’re correct,” he said. “I found nothing.” The little wizard fixed his eyes on Meralda’s. “Perhaps, though, I just wasn’t looking with the right pair of eyes.”
“Bah,” snorted Fromarch. He waved a finger at the Eryan. “We both know that the lights, if they weren’t reflections off the window glass, were nothing but a residual discharge from some old structural spell.”
Shingvere shrugged. Meralda remembered the laughter on the stair and shivered and took another cold draught of Fromarch’s beer.
“Bah,” said Fromarch again. “So how are you going to go about moving the Tower shadow, Thaumaturge?” he asked.
Meralda wiped her lips. “Directed refraction,” she said. Shingvere slapped his knee.
“Told you!” he crowed. Fromarch scowled.
“He thought you’d hang those spark lights of yours from scaffolds and aim them at the ground,” said Shingvere. “I told him they weren’t bright enough, and if they were they’d be too hot.”
Meralda nodded. “I’m working on cooler, brighter lights,” she said. “But that could take months. Months I won’t get, with Yvin wasting my time at every turn.”
“Spoken like a mage, lass!” said Shingvere. The Eryan donned a wicked smile. “Now you see why I spend so much time away from Erya and that blatherskite queen. She’d have me whiling away the hours as a magic carpet cleaner, you mark my words.”
Fromarch snorted. “So instead you come to Tirlin and chase ghosts,” he said, lifting his bottle. “Another college education, gone sadly to waste.”
Shingvere grinned. “Will you be latching your refraction spell to the Tower itself?” he asked.
“Of course,” said Meralda. “The focal volume will be just below the ceiling of the Wizard’s Flat.” She tilted her head. “If, that is, your ghosts won’t mind.”
Shingvere nodded gravely. “Oh, I don’t think they will,” he said. “But I’d ask them nicely first, all the same. No harm in being polite, is there?”
“No harm in being a soft-headed old fool, either,” muttered Fromarch. He leaned back into the shadows. “But do have a care latching spells to the Tower,” he said. “We had a devil of a time, way back when.”
“Aye,” Shingvere said. “The structural spellworks left a residual charge. New spells tend to unlatch, after a short time. Even old skinny there had trouble working around it.”
Fromarch began to snore. Shingvere yawned and rose from his settee, padding quickly across the dimly lit room toward Meralda. “Well,” he said, smiling. “Just like old times. Seems we young folks need to put the oldsters to bed.”
Shingvere offered his hand, and Meralda took it, and rose. “It’s good to have you two back,” she said, in a whisper. “I’ve been worried about him, since he retired. He used to come around, but lately...”
“He doesn’t want you to feel like you’re still working in his shadow,” replied Shingvere. “He’s really not such a bad old fellow, once you get to know him. And I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a bit of company here, now and then.”
Meralda nodded. I’ll make the time, she vowed. Yvin can deal with it in any way he pleases.
Shingvere grinned. “That’s my ’prentice,” he said. Fromarch began to mumble restlessly.
“I’ll see you at court, I’m sure,” said Shingvere. “Tomorrow. But for now, we should all get some sleep. News of the Hang will break tomorrow, and that will make for a very long day of hand-wringing and useless conjecture.”
Meralda groaned softly and rose. Shingvere took her hand, and the pair tip-toed, giggling and stumbling, through Fromarch’s darkened sitting room.
Meralda gathered her light cloak from the rack on the wall and stepped outside. Angis and his coach sat in the dim red glow of a gas lamp. Angis’ cabman’s hat slumped over his eyes, and his chest rose and fell in perfect time with Fromarch’s snores.
Shingvere laughed. “Looks like we’re the only ones left awake,” he said.
“Good night,” said Meralda, struggling to regain her composure. “It’s been a lovely evening.” She shook her head to clear it, letting the cool night air wash over her face.
Shingvere bowed. “Aye, lass, that it has,” he said. “Would that I were thirty years younger.”
Meralda returned his bow. “You’ve been an old bachelor all your life,” she said. “But I love you anyway, you rascal of an Eryan wand-waver.”
Then she turned and darted for the cab. Shingvere laughed and bowed and watched her go. He waved once to Angis as the cabman snapped his reins. Then he turned back to the door and Fromarch’s lightless sitting room.
Inside, Fromarch stirred. “She gone?” he asked.
“Gone,” said Shingvere, settling into a chair and fumbling in the dark for his pipe pouch.
Fromarch muttered a word, and a light blazed, slow and gentle, from a point below the center of the ceiling.
“Thank you,” said Shingvere, filling the bowl of a blackened, ancient Phendelit wood pipe. “May I?”
“Please do,” said Fromarch. A flame appeared at Shingvere’s fingertip, and he lit his pipe with it.
“She’s in for a bad summer,” said Shingvere, after a moment of sucking at the pipe stem. “The Hang. The Tower. The Vonats.”
Fromarch nodded. “Vonats are sending that new wizard of theirs. Humindorus Nam. Mean piece of work.”
“So I hear,” said Shingvere. “Think the stories are true?”
Fromarch snorted. “Every other word, if that,” he said. Then he frowned. “Still. Met him once, years ago, outside Volot. Don’t ask what I was doing there.”
“I won’t,” said Shingvere. “Mainly because I’ve known for years, but go ahead.”
“Met him then,” said Fromarch, squinting back as if across the years. “Called himself just Dorous, then. Mad, he was. Twisted up inside. Didn’t figure he’d last long enough to be a danger to anybody but himself.”
Shingvere pulled his pipe from between his lips. “He’s still a danger to himself, I’ll wager,” he said. “Pity is, he might be a danger to Mage Ovis, too. We can always hope a manure cart runs over him first, but I don’t think that’s likely.”
Fromarch grunted. “She’s smarter than both of us put together,” he said, gruffly. “She can take care of herself. And Nam too, if need be.”
Shingvere nodded. “Of course, of course,” he said. “After all, it’s bad form for one wizard to interfere in the matters of another. She’d be furious, and rightly so.”
“Simply isn’t done,” said Fromarch, shaking his finger. “Breech of professional etiquette. Runs counter to everything we taught her.”
Shingvere wedged his pipe in the corner of his mouth and settled deeper into his chair. “Glad that’s settled, then,” he said. “So, which lot do you want to interfere with? The Vonat or the Hang?”
Fromarch dimmed the foxfire, conjured up a fresh-rolled Alon cigar, and broke into a sudden, awful grin.
Chapter Four
Morning broke for Meralda as it always did, with the sound of the five-twenty trolley gasping and groaning its way past while that devil of a trolley master banged madly away at his brass bell at each and every deserted, windswept corner.
Meralda gritted her teeth and strangled her pillow until the trolley rattled away. Then, within an instant, the paperboys began to sing.
“Hang fleet on the Lamp!” one cried. “Two pence for the Post! Two pence for the Hang!”
Mug awoke, demanding news. Meralda drowsily recounted Shingvere’s revelation of the Hang, bade Mug ruminate in silence, and threw back her covers.
The morning sun was bright, and it set her head to pounding. Still, she rose, rummaged for fresh clothes, and bathed. Her coffee urn was still empty, but the Bellringers, when they arrived, bore coffee and a bag of warm donuts, fresh
from Flayne’s. At her cab, Angis provided Meralda with a sheaf of just read, but neatly folded, early edition papers.
Meralda settled into her seat and unfolded the morning papers. Tervis, seated across from her, had the rare good sense to be silent while she read.
“Hang Fleet—Arrival or Invasion?” screamed the Times. The Post was calmer. Meralda noted with approval at no point in the article did the word invasion appear, but the sidebar detailing the dates and summaries of past Hang visits did hint that this latest incursion was the culmination of five centuries of stealthy surveillance.
Angis bellowed at a trolley and lurched to a halt at Weigh. A pair of hotel bellhops ran past, hats in hand, shouting at each other as they darted ahead of Angis and the trolley.
Meralda finished her coffee. The morning air was crisp, and, since the wind was from the north, it lacked the stench of the stockyards south of the college. Tervis caught her eye and grinned, and Meralda found herself smiling back.
“I know there’s Hang afoot, ma’am, but it is a lovely day, isn’t it?” he said.
The cab charged ahead. Meralda nodded, and Tervis turned away, his eyes on Tirlin. Meralda shuffled papers and continued to read.
The back pages of the papers held news only slightly less alarming than the Hang. The Phendelit delegation had sent word to the palace that they would be arriving two days early. Possibly even later that same day, Meralda realized with a shock.
Not to be outdone, the Alons had also sent word ahead. Hang or no Hang, they were determined to make Tirlin on schedule. “We welcome our friends from across the Great Sea,” the Alon queen was quoted as saying. “We only hope to arrive in time to compose ourselves before we meet.”
Meralda frowned at the latest statement by the Vonats. They ignored the arrival of the Hang, stating instead that due to the deplorable condition of the Eryan roadways in southern Fonth they would be delayed, placing their arrival three days hence. The unnamed Vonat spokesman also offered to give the Eryans lessons in modern road building as an expedient to further cultural exchanges.